"Dead etymons, latent meanings, and lateral connotations lie buried in the roots and phonemes of our living words, where they carry on an active afterlife" (Harrison xi).

Man's response to the universal and inescapable mystery of death is profoundly unlike the response of any other animal. The history of man begins with the history of human burial; early humans developed burial rituals and eventually imagined an afterlife, an underworld, mythologies and gods. Man's treatment of the dead, his fears and dreads of vengeful spirits, his reverence and efforts to honor his ancestors, are thought to have fueled, at least in part, the human capacity for abstract thought, language and metaphor (Larousse 1-7). Once this is understood it is easy to believe, as Robert Pogue Harrison explains, that our relationship with the dead helps make us human. Linguistically, the words we have for death connect to ancient root words developed by our ancestors in the seminal Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture. But enmeshed between these linguistic connections also lurk our earliest metaphors and rudimentary science. The first abstractions, like alchemical equations, quite possibly arose from our ancestor's basic observations of human corpses rotting in the mire, and led from there to what Calvert Watkins describes as the basic formula of universal myths, images of which can still be seen even in modern cinematic visions of apocalypse.

Examination of the distinctive nature of each of four PIE roots (*mer-, *nek-, *%uF06Del- and *dheu) as well as the variety of cognates derived from each establishes a linguistic basis for analyzing human understandings of death; but at a higher level the divisions in meaning between these root words work together within a universal template or formula. The resultant metaphoric compost is staggering in its fecundity and patient study of its richness illuminates profound connections between world and word, body and mind.

First let us discuss frankly the process of death. Lakoff and Johnson would no doubt categorize death as a prime experience that would lead to "experiential gestalts, which are ways of organizing experiences into structured wholes. . . . Structuring our experience in terms of such multidimensional gestalts is what makes our experience coherent" (Lakoff 81). One of the mysteries of death is that it is only observed by the living, from the outside. Because we never "die" (and live to tell about it or comprehend the experience) we have an even more urgent need to comprehend death and make it coherent with our worldview. Metaphors such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY and THE BODY IS A CONTAINER can be used to understand death. As an example, the CONTAINER metaphor would be useful because "We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world - as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities - often also as containers with insides and outsides" (Lakoff 58). Whether from plague or violence, hunger, disease or gradual senescence eventually the loved one or acquaintance or enemy is no longer dying, but dead. The being becomes an object. The object, if not burned or buried, rots. The putrid matter resolves to its organic components, organic sludge and water, all the while emitting noxious fumes. When using THE BODY IS A CONTAINER metaphor the destruction, dissolution of the container forces the question "where does what was CONTAINED go?" When using the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor the destruction of the TRANSPORTATION VEHICLE forces the question how and where does the TRAVELER continue his journey? There are obviously many other metaphors that humans commonly use to make the enormous and eternally mysterious concept of death coherent. It is interesting to focus on how the different metaphors mesh together, as "a concept is structured by more than one metaphor, the different metaphorical structurings usually fit together in a coherent fashion" (Lakoff 86). Throughout this article the JOURNEY and CONTAINER metaphors will be referred to, and coherences between them will be identified.

PIE *mer- (also *mir-), according to Mallory and Adams, is "clearly of great antiquity. It has spawned a number of nominal derivatives" (150). While all the 'death' roots we will examine (and there are still others we will not examine) have many crossover meanings, of all the PIE roots *mer- seems more fundamentally concerned with the physical body (what Lakoff would call the CONTAINER). Even our aliveness, our mortalness, is encompassed by *mer- as it is the basis of *mrtós 'dead; mortal.' From this root come words like Arm. mard meaning 'person,' as well as the Greek word for 'person or mortal'. Closely linked is another derivative *mórtos, in Greek meaning 'person, dead' and in Av. mareta and Olnd marta meaning 'person, mortal.' The physical body is also what is killed by a murderer, and the root *mrtóm means death by murder, as seen in its cognates ON mor%uF064 'murder' and OE mor%uF064 'murder, death, destruction' and OHG mord 'murder' (Mallory 150). By examining a few cognates such as mortify, mortician and mortgage, the physical nature (once again focusing on the corpse or CONTAINER) of many words stemming from *mer- will be confirmed.

Mortify (see Figure 1, Segment 3). Although in our present day usage primarily a description of emotional embarrassment (which actually implies "dying of embarrassment" and even decaying (at least figuratively) right in front of the mortifier or humiliator), 'mortify' goes back to the physical results: what happens when the CONTAINER dies? Decay. 'Mortification of the flesh' is an ancient religious practice still found in many religions, where the physical CONTAINER of the worshiper is deliberately flayed, or somehow punished, whether through the wearing of a hair shirt, self-flagellation, abstemious eating or drinking, or other ritual physical self-torment of some kind. The purpose behind this mortification is to heighten the awareness of the sufferer as to the true nature of his/her CONTAINER, and to afford an exquisite experience of the difference between the mortified body and WHAT IT CONTAINS. The OE cognate mortifien specifically translates as 'to deaden, subdue' (American Heritage OL). The mortifier is attempting to deaden his physical desires, to subdue his or her physical cravings. Mortifying the flesh results in 'Purifying the soul' by separating body and soul awareness, or distinguishing between the CONTAINER and WHAT IT CONTAINS. Because all of our physical beauty and vanities will someday rot, when our corpse shows its mortality by decomposing, we will all be mortified (physically) when our sweet beloved flesh melts into the putrid matter of decay.

The physical CONTAINER aspect of *mer- continues unabated in countless words. A mortician primarily manages the corpse (the CONTAINER) prior to burial, and a mortuary as well as a morgue is the PLACE (CONTAINER of the CONTAINER) where the physical remains are stored prior to their JOURNEY to a grave. Although a mortgage has no literal connection to a corpse, it does refer to physical property. As the American Heritage word history of mortgage (where mort is dead and gage is pledge) states, "[t]he great jurist Sir Edward Coke . . . explained . . . 'if [the mortgagee] doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead'" (OL). As a further example, Figure I, Segment 7 lists many words that extend from *mer- through the Latin root mordêre, "to bite." Physical objects can be bitten of course, and corpses actually become meat that can be eaten, although if anyone would bite a corpse they would no doubt be filled with remorse another cognate of mordêre meaning bitter [or biter?] regret (American Heritage OL). There are many other examples of words that have a specifically physical nature stemming from *mer-, and after several other points are made the importance of this physical quality will be investigated further.

Another PIE root, *nek-, while having definite overlap with the physical nature of *mer- [i.e. *nekus leads to TochB enkwe 'man', TochA onk 'man' and Av. nasu- 'corpse' as well as a Greek word nekro for 'corpse; dead'], in general focuses more on the actual 'process' of dying or killing. Mallory and Adams translate *nek- to mean 'perish, die' (150). Many of its cognates include the words 'disappear' in their definition [TochA näkstär and TochB nakstär both mean 'disappears, perishes' while naksäm also means 'destroys'; Av. nasyeiti is rendered as 'disappears']. It is clear that *nek- is describing something other than a blatantly physical, non-disappearing corpse, isn't it? *Nek- is talking about something that vanishes in the act of killing [Latin necõ means 'kill', noceõ means 'inflict injury'] (Mallory 150). What disappears? What leaves its CONTAINER empty, and where does it go? Does WHAT IS CONTAINED continue its JOURNEY without its CONTAINER /VEHICLE? Is that how it disappears?

Derivatives of *nek- like nocent, nocuous, nuisance, innocent, and innocuous are all words coming from the o-grade form *nok-eyo (American Heritage OL). These derivatives do not describe corpses or physical objects; they are adjectives describing states of being. They enlighten us further on the non-physical or more process-oriented senses that can arise from this word *nek-. Lakoff and Johnson remind us that "[t]he very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another . . . will necessarily hide other aspects of a concept . . . a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor" (10). In other words, while *mer- provides us with words for the CONTAINER, *nek- provides us with words for the JOURNEY.

Having multiple PIE stems for multiple death concepts allows for a linguistic palate of sufficient richness to metaphorically paint an experiential gestalt comprehensive enough to map out and mythologize a concept as pervasive and overwhelming as death. Because the metaphors are different but consistent we have *mer- for the concept of the physical body (the CONTAINER), and *nek- for the concept that something, perhaps a state of being, disappears in the process of death, (the CONTAINED).

Other PIE stems listed by Mallory and Adams include *uel- and *dheu (150). While like *mer- and *nek- *uel- also means "die," the important distinction is that *uel- focuses on HOW death occurs, specifically rewarding brave warrior death. *Uel- is important as it deals much more obviously with the spirit; it is from a *uel- cognate, ON valr 'one who dies on the battlefield,' that the concept of valor descends, and cognate ON val-holl leads to "Valhalla" the place where the valorous souls dwell as well as cognate val-kyrja, describing the Valkyrie who chooses the valorous from the slain. Mallory and Adams note: "More speculative is any connection with the Greek adjective 'Elysian Fields' (the abode of the [heroic] dead)" (150). Calvert Watkins in his remarkable book How to Kill A Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics includes a definition of a linguistic formula: "two phrases in the two languages, two syntagmas of noun and adjective, which have, as we shall see, every right to be termed formulas" (173). The formula Mr. Watkins refers to, of course, is that of IMPERISHABLE, UNFAILING FAME. He later enlarges the scope of what he means by a linguistic formula, stating: "the real comparison is syntactically deeper - i.e., higher - than just the noun phrase and that it is an all the more remarkable formulaic, syntactic, and thematic equation" (177). The ideas connected with words related to PIE *uel- point to the notions of 'slaughter,' 'carnage,' 'dead bodies,' 'make war upon,' and 'battlefield,' but importantly, from the same PIE stem come words that mean 'soul,' 'spirit,' 'remembrance of the dead,' 'god of the dead,' 'spirit of the dead,' 'rite of remembrance of the dead' (obviously these meanings derive from many different cognates of *uel-) (Mallory 150). If any PIE stem word comes close to explaining the Indo-European root belief in IMPERISHABLE FAME, the immortality that only those who have died in battle while fighting with valor will earn, it is *uel-. *Uel- begins to chart a territory for the valorous dead (Valhalla and the Elysian Fields), and where DEATH IS A JOURNEY a destination, after all, is required. PIE stem *dheu- and its derivative *dheubh- carve out more metaphoric territory.

While Lat funus renders 'burial' from PIE *dheu-, the more productive cognate *Dheubh points the way down, for it means deep, hollow. Old English cognate deop means deep, from Germanic *deupaz. Dive, dip and sink, from Old English dyfan dyppan and dufan also stem from the Germanic *dubjan (American Heritage OL). These downward directions confirm the intuition that if we bury our dead under the ground, the next step of the JOURNEY metaphor would be the UNDERWORLD. *Dhub(h)-n- and *b(h)ud(h)-n- are seen as Indo-European doublets by inversion, and they mean 'bottom' 'foundation' and 'depths' (American Heritage OL). Lakoff and Johnson found many structural metaphors, "cases where one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another" and, even more importantly orientational metaphors that "organize a whole system of concepts with respect to one another" (Lakoff 14). An example of an orientational metaphor referring to the fact that "sickness and death are DOWN" is the following: "He fell ill. He's sinking fast. He came down with the flu. His health is declining. He dropped dead. Physical Basis: Serious illness forces us to lie down physically. When you're dead, you are physically down" (Lakoff 15). This general orientational metaphor has obviously long been in existence, for Hades was the ancient ruler of the Underworld. Interestingly, Mallory and Adams point out that while the Valkyries brought the souls of the valorous to a sky-afterworld (a HEAVEN) in Valhalla (a sign of their IMPERISHABLE FAME), the souls of those who had not died in battle went to an underworld (a kind of HELL) where their bodies underwent the process of decay. In the underworld the processes of decay are hidden, and hence "many earth or hidden goddesses such as Greek Calypso, Norse Hel, Germanic Frau Holle, Batavian Nehalennia, Frisian Hludana, and Roman Mania or Laria: each of these names contains a root meaning 'hide', referring to the role of earth in concealing the disintegration of the corpse" (Mallory 612). Thus in PIE culture, only brave warriors didn't decay. This is a crucial point, which will be revisited.

To validate the nature of these orientational metaphors and see that they are still intrinsically embedded within our language as well as our secular media culture, as recently as 2005 the world enjoyed the critically acclaimed HBO television series Six Feet Under. This thoroughly modern yet mystical exploration of the many dimensions and connections made possible by a mythical 'afterlife' consistently depicted LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphors, especially the series finale montage which was a stunningly coherent JOURNEY towards LIFE and DEATH.

In 1936 linguist Louisa Pound found many interesting metaphors for where the dead go popular in American culture. Her article on "American Euphemisms for Dying" included such amusing references as "City/Village Of The Dead, Skeleton Park, Last Home, Underground Jungle, Long Home, Cold Mud, Deep Six, Earth Bath, Dust Bin, Great Divide, A Neat Oblong Hole In The Ground, Narrow Home, Passed Into The Unknown Night, Passed To His Reward, Was Guided Into The Shade And Reached His Journey's End," among many others (Pound 197-201).

From all these references it is clear that we conceptualize death as a JOURNEY, and that we envision a parallel world either UNDER or ABOVE our plane, structured in terms of our own reality. These concepts are not only ideas, but are contained within the very stems of our etymons and circle back to our origins in PIE culture.

Find more of this essay further down the page

Returning, now that these basics have been established, to our discussion of *mer- and *nek-, there are some incredibly interesting metaphoric systems that arise from analyzing these stems further. It is possible that some new poetic formula, perhaps one day describable as a corollary to Calvert Watkins' "remarkable formulaic, syntactic and thematic equation" could be discovered in the resolution of the following complexly human ideas about death, dying, immortality and decay.

Both *mer- and *nek- have cognates that mean "immortal." Ambrosia (from Greek ambrotos) comes from *mer- by the prefix 'a' (Greek 'not') to turn death into "not death" and following the addition of a homo-organic stop 'b' (Beckwith).

Ambrosia is called the "food of the gods" for it is what makes them immortal, undying. Interestingly it is called a food, and the word is formed from the version of death, *mer-, that we have noted most consistently refers to the actual physical CONTAINER of the dead body. Amrita (Sanskrit amrtam), however, the Hindu version of ambrosia, is said to be a "drink" of immortality prepared by the Hindu gods (American Heritage OL). Still, it is an interesting circumstance that the PIE stem that most frequently connotes BODY yields an immortal FOOD, while the PIE stem *nek-, when linked to PIE *terh- (OVERCOME) yields an immortal DRINK. Recall that *nek- stem gave us more words for describing process than solid physical objects. In addition, Calvert Watkins points out that the verb *terh2- has "[a] striking semantic feature . . . precisely [of] temporariness, transitoriness, non-permanence" (355). So NECTAR, literally overcoming death, uses a stem that refers to a process, and a suffix that is noted for its transitoriness, and the resultant word NECTAR is literally a drink, a fluid. Of course both Nectar and Ambrosia are sweet and delicious but are, by definition, only enjoyed by Gods and the few HEROS, such as Hercules, who are permitted to "reach the gods. Just this doctrine recurs in the Hittite rituals for the dead: having passed over death the defunct is with the gods beyond" (Watkins 392). The sweetness of immortality, IMPERISHABLE FAME, was strictly attainable by warriors in PIE culture, hence the warlike nature of the culture and the fact that the cultures that have descended from it devote their epics to the glorification of warrior heroes. But why are these heroes so eager to die heroically, so convinced that the formula "LOSE good fame - GAIN long life" is not worth the exchange (Watkins 176)? It is precisely this question that can be answered by returning to *mer- and its cognates once again.

In complete contrast to the sweetness of ambrosia and nectar (NOT DEATH) is the putrescence of physical matter as it decays. It is the putrescence of the body decaying, the rotting corpse (the CONTAINER dissolving), that horrifies the living. To fully understand the final cognates of *mer- that apply to this argument it is essential to examine several other words: human, man, earth, moor, mire, poison, pig and swill. "Human bodies, when they perish, share in this organic afterlife of the dead. They are "rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / with rocks, and stones, and trees," to speak with Wordsworth. The human returns to the humus, to be sure . . ." (Harrison 2). The 1250 M. Fr. word humain is thought to come from both Latin humanus "man" and "humus" earth on "notion of "earthly beings" (Etymonline OL).

Certainly almost all myths about the origin of man include some version of a god shaping a man out of clay, and breathing life into him. These myths most likely have their source in precisely the experience we are talking about - coming across a corpse as it slowly dissolves to its organic components, or finding the fragile bones of a parent whose flesh had dissolved while underground for a year or two and realizing that the flesh had been reabsorbed into the earth, leaving black rich soil replete with thriving colonies of worms. A perfect myth, or metaphor, to make this experience coherent, would feature a divine being (be it Prometheus or any other deity who shapes the original man out of earth) using his/her hands to create man, PIE base *man- (Etymonline OL).

Ironically, the adjective for by or of the hand, manual, from the Latin manualis, from somewhat later, stems from the PIE *men-, perhaps due to the myths of men being fashioned by divine hands. PIE *man- led to P.Gmc. *manwaz, among other cognates, and eventually to OE man, mann, meaning "human being, person" (Etymonline OL). Perhaps because Man is our identity this word has remained quite conservative since ancient times. The earth, of which we are at least mythologically made, goes to PIE base *er- and has cognates in OE of eyr%uF071ling "plowman" (Etymonline OL).

At this point we are ready to explore some interesting problems vis ancient texts and mysterious words.

Calvert Watkins quotes what Plato wrote about the afterlife in the myth of the plain of Lethe, "the souls of evildoers undergo suffering not to be looked upon, lying in the mire" (Watkins 283). Mire is an interesting and important word, but its etymons are not clear. Mire sounds suspiciously like *mer-, and in fact Mallory and Adams list the PIE root of *mer- alternatively spelled as (*mir-/ *mer-) (150). Etymonline claims, however, that mire is a cognate of OE mos "bog". Ooze, "soft mud" comes from OE wase which is defined as "soft mud, mire" from P. Gmc *waison and PIE *weis- "to flow" (OL). Mallory and Adams, on the other hand, link OE wase to ON veisa 'swamp, and Wels. gwyar 'blood', and still more interestingly to cognates such as Latin virus 'potent liquid, poison, venom' and Grk ióç '(organic fluid), poison; stagnant smell and taste' and the PIE *uiss- 'poison, poisonous liquid, snake venom or poisonous sap' (439). Taken all together these cognates make mire sound like a horrifying, toxic mixture of mud, blood and human flesh dissolving down in organic decay, indissolubly mixed into an oozing soft mud.

Calvert Watkins also introduces two extremely unusual words from an ancient Hittite text, which is primarily about the birth of the soul and apparently was composed about 1200 years before Plato's writings. These words are ténewas%u02C6 and mirmirr-us. The souls who are unfortunate are doomed to forgetting their loved ones. Before learning where they will go they beg "Let me not go to the evil ténewas%u02C6, the ténewas%u02C6 is evil. . ." (Watkins 289). Furthermore, the translation of the text goes on to describe that the souls who go to the evil ténewas%u02C6 of oblivion eat only clay and drink muddy water.

Watkins says,The Hittite word for the filthy muddy water that the damned must drink is mirmirr-us%u02C6. (accusative plural), a noun with expressive reduplication apparently built on the root of Hittite mer(r), mir(r)- 'disappear, vanish, cease to exist.' While this could be only a folk etymology, the sinister, dismal drink of the dead contains two repeated syllables beginning with a labial and ending with an r. The same sequence is found in the Greek word for 'liquid mire, muddy liquid, filth' %uF062ó%uF072%uF062%uF06F%uF072-%uF06Fç, likewise with expressive reduplication. In Aeschylus' Eumenides (694) %uF062ó%uF072%uF062%uF06F%uF072-%uF06Fç makes clean water undrinkable:
Polluting clean water with filthy effluents of mire / you will never find a drink. (Calvert 289)

Compared to eating Ambrosia and drinking Nektar, eating clay and drinking muddy water seems like a direct opposition, a very obvious comparison of the difference between being immortal and being mortal. Because Ambrosia and Nektar contain the actual words of death, *mer- and *nek-, it can be supposed that mirmirr-us and tenewas are also based on *mer- and *nek-. But what if the word analysis goes even deeper? What if Man + EaRth + Death = Mire - or M'er mer- uiss-? That could explain the 'expressive reduplication' highlighted by Watkins. And what if Tenewas contains te NEK WAS? Death + Mire? If dying a death that is not a heroic death means that one would be fated to eat MIRE, or the flesh of decayed people dissolving into earth and watered by the blood and fluid released from flesh as it decays, then truly a human would want to be heroic. The same concept, the choice between fame and rotting into mud and water, is directly found in the Iliad. Urging his men onwards to the imperishable fame of being slain by Hector, Menelaos says in Book VII of the Iliad: "O you boasters! You women - I cannot call you men! Here is a stain upon us, a terrible terror of a stain, if not a man will go out to meet Hector! May you all rot into mud and water where you sit, weak and inglorious [emphasis added]" (Rouse 85).

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More of this essay found further down on this page.

Once again our current culture is redolent with echoes of these age-old images, ideas and metaphors. The 1995 movie Waterworld featured a world covered in water after the polar ice caps had melted. Residents of a floating atoll attempt to create their own earth by recycling the corpses of their grim little community. Just before the hero becomes a hero he is plunged into the vat of filthy mire. After he accepts the call to adventure he is released from the vat, but not before he had swallowed and spit out mouthfuls of the human soup, the mire he almost drowned in. He accepts a hero's duty, he might not die condemned to drinking mire. The persistence of these words and images across millennia and media, from stone tablet to DVD is not actually remarkable. It is evidence of the coherence of experiential gestalt, the systematicity which helps us comprehend a thing like death, that constantly retrieves these images from our very language when they will be useful.
Black pigs were considered appropriate sacrifices to the chthonic deities of the Underworld (Mallory 611). The unsettling connection between pigs and mire needs to be thought of before passing to another topic. The PIE root *perk- means "dig, furrow" and the pig is so-named because "this reflects the widespread IE tendency to name animals from typical attributes or activities." The word manticore 'man-eater' comes from *mer-, and is related to the Germanic *swil, swill (Etymonline OL). Common phrases still heard in English today are "that's pig swill" "happy as a pig in mire" and "go out and swill the pigs". Apparently one reason that many religions consider pigs to be "unclean" is that they are commonly thought to be happy digging in mire, and don't notice that they might be eating human flesh. Another example of television carrying on these cultural assumptions is the HBO western Deadwood. In this raunchy gold rush era town there is a Chinaman named "Wu" who has a pigpen full of pigs that regularly dispose of corpses produced by the unpredictable violence of the gun-toting men who run the town of Deadwood.
Finally, to dig deeper through the mire, another word, moor, means "waste ground" from PIE *mer- and hence "dead land" (Etymonline OL). A dead land is quite vividly described in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Return of the King as part of the approach of the hobbits to Morder (obviously the land of Biting (remember mordere?) Death):
"They had come to the very midst of the Dead Marshes, and it was dark . . . The fens grew more wet, opening into wide stagnant meres, among which it grew more and more difficult to find the firmer places where feet could tread without sinking into gurgling mud. . . . (613)
and
"Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-Lands, . . . Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come,; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness . . . They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument . . . a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing - unless the great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion" (617).
There are a multitude of interesting topics I would like to explore in a continuation of this paper. One would involve linking the Christian communion and transubstantiation to the linguistics and metaphors behind Nektar and Ambrosia. The differences between the PIE cultural notions of who would have access to HEAVEN and IMPERISHABLE FAME when compared to modern metaphoric and religious concepts of the afterlife would make a fascinating study. Another compelling topic would be to investigate the relationships of the ideas explored in this paper to the metaphoric coherences of war and glory so obviously embedded in our history and current media culture. Discovering the linguistic underpinnings of war might help unlock the mysteries of violence and dysfunction that are so problematic in our modern, fragile, complex world. Robert Pogue Harrison's insights seem appropriate here: "As Homo sapiens we are born of our biological parents. As human beings we are born of the dead - of the regional ground they occupy, of the languages they inhabited, of the worlds they brought into being, of the many institutional, legal, cultural, and psychological legacies that, through us, connect them to the unborn" (Harrison xi).

FIGURE 1: A table summarizing the entry for mer-, found in The American Heritage® Dictionary's Appendix I: Indo-European Roots (Bartleby Online).
Bear with me while I learn how to add a table here

Works Cited
Beckwith, Miles. Conversation. New Rochelle: November 2005.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. Accessed online. 27 November 2005 61/IEroots.html>
Harper, Douglas. Online Etymological Dictionary. November 2001. Accessed 20 November 2005
Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
New Larouse Encyclopedia of Mythology. "Prehistoric Mythology." New York: Prometheus Press, Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1974.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Mallory, James P. and Douglas Q Adams. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.
Pound, Louise. "American Euphemisms for Dying, Death, and Burial: An Anthology." American Speech, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Oct. 1936), 195-202. JSTOR Database. 20 November 2005 sici?sici=0003-1283%28193610%2911%3A3%3C195 %3AAEFDDA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8>
Rader, Peter and David Twohy. Waterworld. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 1995.
Rouse, W. H. D. Homer: The Iliad. New York: Mentor New American Library, 1946.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill A Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Read But Not Cited
Barton, Charles R. ""PIE. *mer-, Arm. Meranim 'Die'." Indogermanische Forschungen Vol. 94. New York: W. de Gruyter, 1989, pgs. 135-157.
Turner, Mark. Death is the Mother of Beauty. Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2000.