Quote:
Originally Posted by Drifloon
Sure it's okay to have multiple definitions of the word 'dead' in play.
Eva is dead. Shannon is dead. The phone line is dead.
You can infer what kind of 'death' is being referred to by looking at what is said to have 'died'.
A person dies a physical death.
A 'personality' dies a metaphorical/symbolic death.
A phone system 'dies' if it is no longer functional. And so on.
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I was hoping someone would bring this argument up because it's really, really stupid. The reason a telephone line being "dead" works is because inanimate mechanical or electronic objects being "dead" when they are non-functional is a
collectively-understood definition, in the same sense that you'd call a roadkilled squirrel or your great-great-grandma "dead" because it's collectively understood to mean a termination of biological life. If nobody ever used one of those particular definitions, you'd get quizzical looks when you used expressions like "I heard a gasp and thump on the other end of the line. Then the phone and my grandma were dead." The wordplay works only because we recognize as a body of language users that a particular word has two distinct meanings. That by itself is not
carte blanche for someone to make up their own definition of the word and then claim it's okay because the word has more than one meaning.
The entire lynchpin of the supposed Beatrice-really-believed-it red concept is that the definition makes sense...
to her. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else. But that's a violation of the general understanding that we have for how language operates. I don't get to define turds as "ice cream sandwiches" unless I specifically tell everyone else, who are accustomed to not getting a big bite of shit for dessert, what I mean when I say "ice cream sandwich." Beatrice was obliged to present a
universal definition of "dead," even if that definition required some clever thinking to understand how it might apply to a person faking death. Hence my suggestion that "dead" be treated to exclusively refer to the
appearance of death as either an actual event or participation in deception, as at least it is then equally consistent for a person actually murdered and a person faking death and avoids any "personality" shenanigans at all.
Even if you say the concept is meant to apply to Beatrice and to her inner circle, the audience is Battler. No evidence is ever presented to show that Battler shares such a commonality of language, nor is any apparent effort made to actually permit him to come to that understanding. And it rather goes without saying that it's manipulative to an extreme with respect to a reading audience.