Slain

[bungeejumper]

It's a funny old world. Maybe a century after the achingly melodramatic "slain" word was generally dropped from day to day use, the papers are still using it. Well, in America they are - I'm not so sure that the UK is still using it very much?

Which makes it doubly interesting that the BBC chose to use the s word this morning, with its accusatory overtone, when describing the funeral crowds in Tehran. "Huge crowds at funeral for slain Iran commander. Iran's supreme leader leads prayers for Qasem Soleimani, killed in a US drone strike on Friday, "

Well, that was situation at 11.00 am this morning. By 12.30, though, it had changed to "Huge crowds have packed the streets of the Iranian capital Tehran for the funeral of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani,", who it says "was assassinated in a US drone strike in Iraq on Friday on the orders of President Donald Trump".

The difference being, I suppose, that now America is awake, and that some copy editor has had his knuckles rapped about the s word. I wonder how long it'll take for the "assassinated" to disappear as well?

BJ

[Dod101]

To slay - is it 'achingly melodramatic? Maybe but I think it is, in the context, probably more accurate than assassinate which to me has an element of illegality about it, usually used instead of 'to murder'.

Qasem Soleimani was obviously killed by the Americans and whether that was legal or not I am in some doubt about, but the deed was done, and I would say he was slain but not necessarily assassinated.

If you are suggesting that it might have been better to simply have used the verb 'killed' I would probably agree with you.

Dod

[UncleEbenezer]

It's kind-of archaic because most of us are never involved either in murder or warfare. Thus the slayings we encounter tend to be literary. But I see nothing wrong with the word. Indeed, having learned to read on Tolkien, I can say with reasonable certainty it was the first word for homicide I encountered.

In this case, if you want a businesslike modern word, it's obviously murder. The alternative execution implies due process of law.

[Dod101]

Generally, UE, I bow to your literary opinions but I am not sure that slain and murder are necessarily the same. I think as I have said above, that assassinate is closer to murder than slain.

Dod

[servodude]

Isn't the defining feature of a slaying that it is of a physically violent nature?


- sd

[UncleEbenezer]

Isn't the defining feature of a slaying that it is of a physically violent nature?


- sd

Shakespeare thought otherwise:

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

[servodude]

Isn't the defining feature of a slaying that it is of a physically violent nature?


- sd

Shakespeare thought otherwise:

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

There's a thank for thy pains

-sd

[bungeejumper]

It's kind-of archaic because most of us are never involved either in murder or warfare. Thus the slayings we encounter tend to be literary. But I see nothing wrong with the word. Indeed, having learned to read on Tolkien, I can say with reasonable certainty it was the first word for homicide I encountered.

The Tolkien link is interesting, and relevant, I think, because it's the knights and the dragons and the cruel monstrous regimes that we still associate with the word. I suspect that slain went out of fashion some time around the first world war, when killing people ceased to be a valiant hand-to-hand business and turned into an automated khaki massacre where there was no glory to be had. No coincidence, perhaps, that the Gothic/pre-Raphaelite/Arts and Crafts era also ended so decisively in 1914?

Kipling got away with it, just ("and I must face the men I slew"), but he was talking in a poetic/philosophical mode at the time. These days the word still surfaces in comic or ironic contexts like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but otherwise it's surely too archaic for common use?

BJ