Death of the Late Mr. Jones

I picked Mr. Jones totally at random. Don't worry about it. If you're at all concerned about the Mr. Jones who lives in the flat upstairs, I'm not talking about him.

I was reading a news item about the esteemed leader of the opposition here in Ireland, and in between bouts of fist shaking and random imprecations, I wandered over to the party web site to see what manner of spin they put on Mr. Kenny's words. There was no mention of it. However, something did catch my eye in his biography; "he was first elected in a by-election following the death of his late father Henry Kenny".


This manner of phrasing jarred me; why the 'late'? It seems distinctly redundant. And if not redundant, just plain wrong. When we speak of the late Mr. Jones, we of course mean that as we speak, he's dead. But does 'late' always mean that? If we talk of the death of the late Mr. Jones, are talking about someone who died twice? Of course we're not. So, to a certain extent, this matters not a whit. However, the pedant in me twitches at the apparent tautology and won't let it go.

If we speak of the freedom of Dublin being conferred on the late Chester Beatty, we're suggesting that he subsequently died, not that the honour was conferred posthumously. So that's no help.

Webster's (and other dictionaries I checked) tell us that the word applies to those recently deceased, but I suspect that the usage has expanded a bit, and is now applied to anyone who's shuffled off this mortal coil.

I wandered over to google and searched for  "death of * late", and found nearly 80 million hits, so it's not all that uncommon a phrase. Granted, a fair proportion of those were irrelevant, but there were still enough that it seemed obvious that the phrase enjoys some currency.

The next logical step, of course, is to consult some manner of corpus to see if this is a new phenomenon. Standard disclaimer here: I'm not a linguist, and not well versed in the art of corpus consultation. Nonetheless, upon searching the 400-million word Corpus of Historical American English for the same phrase, I found sporadic uses of it; one every few years up to 1990, when they disappeared.

This leads me to one of two conclusions;

1. I don't know how to use corpora.
2. The phrase has very recently become ridiculously popular.

Obviously, the former is more likely. One can't ignore the possibility that the Queen's English Society right and the language is going to hell in a handbasket, but let's face it; they're idiots, so the possibility is remote indeed.

I guess I have some learning to do. And another irritating phrase to learn to tolerate.