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Discredited comments on RIP Doug Engelbart - Less Wrong
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Every time I hear "Rest in Peace" my mind corrects with "...except not resting or at peace". Does anyone have a secular, naturalistic world view analogue? Like "whom we should remember with honor", but catchy.
One of Eliezer's stories (http://lesswrong.com/lw/p1/initiation_ceremony/) uses the formula "Is dead but not forgotten." It's not bad even if I personally would prefer "gone but not forgotten".
"gone" euphemizes death.
'Dead' has a less pleasing sound than 'gone', which fits better in the phrase rhythmically: 'gone' flows into 'but not forgotten', while 'dead' requires more of an abrupt full caesura to deal with the 'tuh' sound at the end.
I happen to like the even more euphemistic sentence I've read often in psychology blog: "Mr. X has left the building". However, if we want to have a naturalistic formula, I would use something on the line of "He is dead but will be remembered", or, if we want an acronym, DBR: dead but remembered.
He has entered the Off-State.
Which I prefer over superstitions about ordering dead people to "rest in peace," because brain preservationists want to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state.
Seriously, think about the traditional expression. We use the imperative tense of the verb "to rest," and it sounds like a spell one of our shamanistic ancestors came up with to keep ghosts from bothering the living.
Not so. Neither the expression "rest in peace" nor the longer version "may s/he rest in peace" contains any imperative verbs. (Also, the imperative is a mood, not a tense.)
In the full expression, the mood is optative, not imperative. That should be clear from the examples at this link. It does not express a command; it expresses a wish.
English doesn't actually inflect for the optative mood; instead, optative meaning is expressed by verbs that are morphologically indistinguishable from the subjunctive or indicative verbs.
Link: grammar.about.com on "mood" actually uses "May he rest in peace" as an example of a sentence using the optative.
As for the shorter "rest in peace," it can be understood either as a truncated version of "may s/he rest in peace," in which case the verb is still optative; or it can be treated as a complete expression. If it's a complete expression then the mood is just subjunctive.
The English expression is a translation of the Latin Requiescat in pace, in which the verb is unambiguously subjunctive.
Link: grammaring.com uses "Rest in peace" as an example of a sentence with a present subjunctive.