No, you don't pass - you die
NPR (Boston) June 7, 2013 While perusing Facebook the other day, we noticed an interesting post by our friend and colleague Michael Goldfarb in London, who was musing about the death — or, more accurately, how we announce it: When did the verb “to die” and the nouns derived from it—dead, death, etcetera — get excised from American usage to be replaced by “to pass.” Wind gets passed. I hereby authorize all 500 plus of my Facebook friends to say of me, when the moment comes, that “Michael died, is dead, his death was a tragedy,” etcetera. Please don’t say, “I’ve passed.” If you need a euphemism, say “I’ve shuffled,” as in shuffled off this mortal coil. Well, that got us thinking. Has “dying” gone out of style? And how do we know whether to say someone has died, versus “passed away”? We asked word guru Ben Zimmer, executive producer of The Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and former “On Language” columnist for the New York Times. He told us: I wouldn’t say it’s falling out o...