Hey, thanks for the question and I really appreciate the intriguing/somewhat humorous connotation it brings.
By saying that the term “living room” should be changed when someone dies implies that the word “living” in living room means to be alive. That means that the room is a living, functioning, specie. However, someone else’s death inside a living room does not necessarily change the definition of living room, so yes, it is still called a living room. Imagine you accidentally swallow a fly, and it dies inside your digestive system. Are you now dead? No. The fly is dead. However, this does bring up an interesting question about English grammar and semantics and the multiple definitions that words can have.
For example, do you actually live in your living room? I don’t know about most people, but personally I just hop between my bedroom, kitchen/dining room, and my study room. Living room is just open space for people to gather or hang out or watch television. So that begs the question, why is it called a “living room” in the first place?
Turns out, the living room that I’ve been referring to has a multitude of other names, like lounge room, sitting room, and drawing room. If the room is near the entrance of a house, sometimes it can even be referred to as a front room. But the actual term “living room” most likely originated from the German word “Wohnzimmer” which roughly translates into “family room.” It first appeared in the English language in around the nineteenth century (which is surprisingly recent) and could have been popularized by German immigrants to the United States during that time. The actual function of a living room is a place for people to hang out and have social events, which means the name “living room” doesn’t entirely represent the function of the room as a whole. Linguistics and semantics can be difficult to trace down and understand, as a word doesn’t have any meaning unless a large group of people in society all agree and use the word. That’s how modern slang and lingo like “cap,” “rizz,” and “skibidi ohio toilet” can all find meaning even if they have a seemingly meaningless usage or past.
So if someone dies in a living room, is it still called a living room?
Short answer - Yes.
Long answer - If society as a whole decided to simultaneously change the definition of “living room” so it fits the context of this question then maybe no, it wouldn’t still be called a living room; it would be called a dead room. It may be possible that over the course of centuries semantic drift will do its thing and come up with an entirely new set of words for our everyday objects. Does it make sense that people park on their driveway but drive on a parkway? No. Not at all. But that’s just how language works. It’s a culmination of cultures, habits, and the way it’s used by people that defines words, even if sometimes it doesn’t make sense.
Hope that helps (and don’t start questioning the definition of every word out there, some of them really make no sense),
Dear Letterbox
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