Ask HN: Can we all stop saying "dead simple"?

3 points by koops ↗ HN
It's a bizarre expression and jarring for people who are dealing with actual death.

2 comments

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If you've been recently bereaved, then I'm sorry for your loss. However, everything is potentially jarring, as complexity multiplies coincidence. Yesterday I read a news report of a person who was seriously injured after he fell off the balcony of a house - on Fell Street. Such coincidences are meaningless, but can make us feel worse anyway because they remind us of our helplessness on the grand scale of things. Those feelings are something we all have to deal with at various times.

The word use itself is not bizarre; there is a large number of similar idioms in English, one of the best known being 'dead reckoning' (for maritime navigation). Nobody knows the origin of this usage; some think it might be an abbreviation of 'deduced' combined with the haphazard development of spelling, but that's only a guess.