Hacker News Reader

Comment by trainfromkansas | Hacker News Reader

No comment on the central message, but I actually like "unalive" as a word: it feels vaguely Old English. "Commit suicide" always felt a little stilted as a two word phrase.

View on HN

You're misunderstanding it, then.

"Commit suicide" in TikTok NewSpeak isn't a single word. It's still two: "unalived themselves". "Unalive" means "kill".

I can still see a lot of linguistic harmony in "unalive oneself" since it follows a familiar reflexive form. What I find weird in "commit suicide" is more the awkwardness of the collocative use of "commit", which is a word that otherwise feels strange outside certain contexts like criminal charges in a courtroom.

Well there's also sudoku, but that might be more early gen z

Which is just an alternative work for seppuku, so it's not like we were lacking in words there :-)

Yeah but that word is banned.

"commit sudoku" is used humorously. Another is "an hero"[1], used a verb. But yes, more millenial than gen z.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/an-hero

All of these codewords are sometimes used humorously. Some of it is making fun of online forums for banning these words.

And let's not forget "well, time to KMS myself"

Plethora of options, really

Can't use kms/kys anymore. Thats on many of the profanity filters too.

Oh yeah, I forgot about kms. It got so patched that nobody uses it anymore.

"Commit suicide" exists because it sounds crime-y, and in fact suicide was a crime in many many jurisdictions for a long time (and that may be the case in some places today).

The author uses "dying by suicide", which is better semantically, but still a bit wordy. Another option might be to verbify "suicide".

"Dying by suicide" sounds extra weird, like they're not dead yet. "Death by suicide" is the phrasing I'd use with those words.

> it feels vaguely Old English.

The Old English verb form would more likely be "dealive", with "unalive" being an adjective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com