I knew a man named Ed Bliss who wrote the news for Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They wrote their commentaries; he oversaw the writing of their newscasts. We often had Ed conduct newswriting seminars at our national broadcast journalism convention. One day I asked him, “When is a person no longer ‘late,’ but is only ‘dead?’’ Ed didn’t know.
When will we no longer refer to “the late” Queen Elizabeth II? Why don’t we refer to “the late Harry Truman?”
King Tut is dead, not “late.”
A related issue showed up a few days ago in a news story that salvagers plan to start plucking unattached objects from Titanic despite an international agreement that considers the wreckage “a sacred burial site.”
What is a “sacred burial site” and does it become less sacred after a certain number of years?
RMS Titanic Inc., based in Georgia, has the salvage rights to Titanic. It plans an expedition next May to shoot a new film of the deteriorating ship and recover any unattached artifacts despite an agreement among Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France that the wreckage is considered a sacred burial site off-limits to looters and salvors. There is a United States law supporting that position.
RMST, on the other hand, reached an agreement in 1994 with the owners of Titanic (Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association to be considered the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic. It has retrieved many items from the sinking and has put them on display in museums such as the one in Branson and in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The place is worth seeing.
Video: (12) Titanic Museum VIP Guided Tour in Branson, Missouri – YouTube
The museums are owned by John Joslyn, who led a 1987 expedition down to the Titanic. The museums hold artifacts recovered after the sinking but not from the wreck of the ship proper.
Other artifacts are housed in other museums in this country, Canada, and the UK.
(Your correspondent has some of the anthracite coal recovered by RMST from the debris field)
RMST says it does not plan to alter the wreckage. But deterioration of the hull has opened new ways to get remotely operated vehicles inside. Court documents say the company also would “recover free-standing objects inside the wreck.” The Associated Press reports that includes items in the Marconi (radio) room that aren’t bolted down.
The telegraph that sent out the distress calls that fateful night is a specific target. RMST wants to pull it out. A judge has rejected a federal government challenge to that plan saying the historical and cultural significance of that device should not be lost to decay.
There are fears that the creatures and the elements will leave the wreckage nothing more than a huge pile of rust within another twenty years.
Very large. A couple of months ago the BBC reported on the completion of the most detailed view of the wreck, shaped from more than 700,000 digital photos that create a 3D rendition. The network superimposed the image(s) on the stadium used for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before – BBC News
or: Titanic: Scan reveals world’s most famous wreck – BBC Newsround
The concept of the Titanic site as being a sacred gravesite brings us back to the “late/dead” discussion.
We have heard of only one human remain found at the wreck site in the many dives to the site, a finger bone with part of a wedding ring attached that was concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen. It was retrieved but was returned to the sea floor on a later dive. It is generally concluded that the passengers’ and crews’ bodies have long ago been consumed by various deep sea organisms.
Some have pointed to shoes on the ocean floor as being remnants of the people who wore them. But that contention is questionable.
Some argue that the Titanic is a graveyard—-an argument heard at the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor and for other lost (and many later found) ships.
But if the bodies have long since disappeared, is it valid to consider such sites as sacred graveyards?
And how long must a body be dead before it can be removed from its burial site, perhaps to be studied by various kinds of scientists?
The mummies of Egypt, mummies found high in the Andes mountains, bodies preserved in peat bogs in northern Europe, skeletons excavated at Williamsburg, Virginia—all of these people clearly are not “late” and society does not demand that they stay buried.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, however, requires that Native American remains that are unearthed or located be transferred to their lineal descendants, for reburial—-the sacred ground philosophy.
And that raises a secondary question. Is it sacred ground only because it is OUR ancestors, OUR people?
And why shouldn’t the Titanic be explored and artifacts be brought to the surface? Are we dishonoring the dead by displaying the clothes they were wearing when they died—long after any physical trace of the person who wore those clothes has disappeared? Or are we instead honoring their memories?
An autoworker in Wichita, Kansas—Joe Combs—was looking for answers when he saw pictures from the titanic debris field of shoes:
Titanic Shoes: Myth & Reality | joeccombs2nd
I think your thoughtful correspondent comes down on Joe’s side—that we honor the victims of the great tragedy—-and those who died less tragically hundreds or thousands of years ago by seeing something tangible about them and in doing that we recognize they were people rather than one of x-number of casualties of a tragedy or citizens of lost civilizations.
This concept is brought home strongly at the Titanic museums when entering visitors are given a card with the name of one of the ship’s passengers on it. At the end of the trip through the museum, the patron can learn if “they” survived or died in the sinking. It’s a good way to humanize the experience.
As for referring to someone as “the late,” maybe we have the answer. It comes from Robert Hickey, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. In his 550-page book, Honor & Respect: the Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address, he writes:
Use ‘the late’ before a name of someone who is deceased – often recently – when one wants to be respectful. For example, on a wedding program:
—-John Smith, the bride’s uncle, will give away the bride in place of her father the late Thomas Smith.
—-The groom is the son of Mrs. James K. Gifford and the late Stephen R. Gifford
Some style guides say a person can only be ‘the late’ if they have been dead less than a decade.
That sounds like a reasonable guideline. Even at that, ten years is a long time to be late.