The Final Fight: An Analysis of Metaphors in Online Obituaries of Professional Athletes

Abstract

In literature, obituaries from different cultures and languages have been studied on different levels and from different perspectives. One of the popular research topics is the use of metaphors, since metaphors help to cope with death, which in modern society is still a taboo. This article presents a bottom-up, primarily qualitative analysis of the metaphors in 150 obituaries of sportspeople, published in online versions of newspapers/magazines and on the Internet. As expected, the obituaries contain the traditional metaphors of death. Also more original, creative metaphors are introduced to describe death in a euphemistic way. Some of those have a link to sports but not systematically to the sport practiced by the deceased.

Rumor Has it: “Dementia” A Discourse-Analytical Analysis of Obituaries of People With Dementia

“…The most obvious of those topics is death, which is “a timeless taboo in which psychological, religious and social interdictions coexist” (Crespo Fernández, 2006, p. 101). Several studies focus on strategies to circumvent the use of the words death and to die, and specifically on the use of metaphors and euphemisms (e.g., Cheung & Ho, 2004; Crespo Fernández, 2011; Galal, 2014; Heynderickx & Dieltjens, 2016; 2021; Heynderickx et al, 2017; Sexton, 1997; Tay, 2019). Such studies have revealed other sensitive concepts which are paraphrased instead of explicitly named.…”

The Death Taboo: Euphemism and Metaphor in Epitaphs from the English Cemetery of Malaga, Spain

“…In doing so, this research analyses the social, cultural and cognitive dimensions of metaphor use in epitaph writing. Given that figurative language constitutes a common way to cope with death in different discourse types and genres-mostly, but not exclusively, epitaphs and obituaries (see Crespo-Fernández 2006, 2013Herrero Ruiz 2007;Jamet 2010;Kuczok 2016;Heynderickx et al 2017;Dieltjens 2021a, 2021b, among others)-this study focuses specifically on the conceptual metaphors aimed at substituting the notions of death and dying inscribed upon the gravestones. For this purpose, the theoretical assumptions that this study is embedded in derive from Steen's (2015Steen's ( , 2017 Deliberate Metaphor Theory.…”

If Cemeteries Could Talk … A Discourse-Analytical Analysis of Epitaphs

“…Texts written after a person's death, such as obituaries, eulogies, and epitaphs, provide interesting material to determine how bereaved family members and friends cope with the loss of a loved one and how direct mentioning of death is avoided. In the previous studies (Heynderickx & Dieltjens, 2016;Heynderickx, Dieltjens & Oosterhof, 2017), we concentrated on obituaries. In this article, the research material consists of epitaphs collected at Belgian cemeteries.…”