How come this years deathlist is doing so poorly?

[Charles De Gaulle 484]

Seems to be a trend as well in the ddp and other death pools where they have less points on average than with other years. Why do you think this is?

[Toast 16,137]

34 minutes ago, Charles De Gaulle said:

Seems to be a trend as well in the ddp and other death pools where they have less points on average than with other years. Why do you think this is?

 

[Perhaps 1,423]

1 hour ago, Charles De Gaulle said:

Why do you think this is?

 

Because the people picked are not dying. 

 

What other answers are you expecting?

[gcreptile 10,967]

DDP wise there are quite a few names that we thought would be long gone by now... especially Frank Field. Also Vicky Phelan maybe, or Julia Reichert...just to choose names from my own team.

Some of the names on our teams also happen to be on the deathlist, like Jerry Lee Lewis, who seems to be doing far better than he "should". Nigel Starmer-Smith looked extremely terrible and I am a little amazed he's not dead yet, and Pelé was a must for the list, too big to miss, and still seems a plausible name for 2022, and probably a very safe bet for 2023.

Some names on the list are apparently duds, and their slots could have gone to better names, I'm thinking of Shane MacGowan who seems somewhat fine. James Whale never even looked bad. He would have been a better pick on last year's list instead of this year, now that we know or can guess that his illness doesn't seem so severe. Noam Chomsky looks very old, but he does seem to keep up with news and gets interviewed every day. Silvio Berlusconi also seemed rather ill late last year, but has recovered - if it ever was that bad.

Ted Kaczynski is terminally ill, and was a good pick. Problem is that we only learned early 2022 that he was given to live until 2023.

 

With Estelle Harris and June Brown we've only had 2 out of the blue age-related deaths. There should be a few more.

 

So quite a few close misses, a few outright mistakes (in my opinion), some surprising developments.

Oh, and what Perhaps said.

[MortalCaso 1,625]

What did we expect?

 

Lost hope for the list when Dick got slated #1

[Bibliogryphon 9,573]

Surely this is a bit of a waste thread and should be in What do you think of the 2022 thread?

[Death Impends 7,964]

1 hour ago, Toast said:

 

 

Legit remembered to use "fewer" instead of "less" for a recent DDP obit solely because of this gif.

[En Passant 3,741]

Why is there no equivalent for 'more' eh?

 

Also you wouldn't ordinarily say I have fewer than 20 dollars, you'd say I have less than 20 dollars, despite it being countable. 

It really is no wonder people get it wrong, even if it grates with some of us

[Spade_Cooley 9,519]

My personal belief is that COVID killed off a lot of people who would have otherwise died in 2022/23. Dunno how my long-listers are finding it but there is absolutely nobody of interest being flagged up as "six/nine months to live" at the moment either, so I think this trend could easily continue.

[Joey Russ 7,220]

What’s particularly weird, at least from the perspective of the main Deathlist, is that there isn’t really anyone you could argue that they were an actual miss that you expected to be on the list. I know people will probably argue with me on folk like Lester Piggott and James Lovelock but in the former’s case everybody would’ve groaned if he made the list a 3rd time and in the latter’s case I think if they were realistically gonna pick Lovelock they would’ve done so years ago

[msc 18,439]

If you have years like 2016 and 2020, where everything happens, you also have years like 2010 and 2022, where not much happens.

[The Immortal 634]

It's not so much about the lack of deaths this year, but rather the excessive deaths in 2020/2021 from the pandemic. That's my observation as someone who has followed the DeathList since 2016. Assuming the DeathList picks up more hits in the winter like it usually does, it seems like an average year.

[Book 3,556]

Perhaps this lull will lead to the committee rethinking that more obvious candidates will be chosen in the future, that the list will be open to people like Deborah James, George Pérez or Gary Burgess, for example. They would have scored well this year, the chart would have had 7 hits in 7 months and no one would complain now

[Death Impends 7,964]

Think the COVID theory is onto something since 2020 was a perfect storm with how names like Giscard d'Estaing, Cardin, Stiller etc felt like they would be a bedblocker hit 2-3 years down the line yet instead died then. Plus 2020 had a few big public cancer battles (Trebek, Ginsburg) whereas 2022 there aren't any besides Pele who still breathes.

[Toast 16,137]

3 hours ago, En Passant said:

Why is there no equivalent for 'more' eh?

 

Also you wouldn't ordinarily say I have fewer than 20 dollars, you'd say I have less than 20 dollars, despite it being countable. 

It really is no wonder people get it wrong, even if it grates with some of us

 

I think some things are amounts that appear to be countable because they are broken down into units.  Except they're not really individual units.

20 dollars is an amount - it's not necessarily going to be 20 single dollar bills.  So we say "less".

50 grams is an amount or quantity, but you dont see the grams as individual units.  So it's "less" again.

 

I may not have thought this through.  Does it make sense?

[Charles De Gaulle 484]

4 hours ago, Joey Russ said:

What’s particularly weird, at least from the perspective of the main Deathlist, is that there isn’t really anyone you could argue that they were an actual miss that you expected to be on the list. I know people will probably argue with me on folk like Lester Piggott and James Lovelock but in the former’s case everybody would’ve groaned if he made the list a 3rd time and in the latter’s case I think if they were realistically gonna pick Lovelock they would’ve done so years ago

I would say James Caan was a miss cause he was mentioned on here quite a bit as being in bad health but that still barely changes anything really.

[Summer in Transylvania 2,175]

To make all of the grammar sticklers happy, please could the admins put the apostrophe in "year's" in the title. Thank you.

[En Passant 3,741]

4 hours ago, Toast said:

I may not have thought this through.  Does it make sense?

 

Absolutely.

And I was prompted to go looking having asked the question. Several places make the same distinction.

There is no equivalent for more, and I'd still like to know why that's the case since we have one for less/fewer, its asymmetrical for no reason I can think of. Lots (many, plenty, non-specific uncountable amounts ) of grammatical rules seem to have no basis in any rational sense. This is just another really.

 

All I'm saying is that despite a lifetime of feeling like somebody was scraping their fingers down a blackboard when I hear these terms misused (there are plenty of others of course..) it's really a matter of just knowing which is used where, much like le/la in French and der/die/das in German. 

One might be able to rationalise it with 'quantities' of money not single bills and thus work it out, but in a conversation you're going to look even odder if you sit and fathom it out than simply get it wrong, so you have to just 'know' which it is in advance to do it smoothly.

 

I'm trying to be less judgmental about it really. Sadly somewhat unsuccessfully. 

 

On the bright side, I still hold 'somefink' 'nuffink' and 'nucular' in greater contempt  

 

 

Thinking about it even further of course this the entire reasoning for Esperanto.

Pity about that, and Dvorak keyboards....

[Great Uncle Bulgaria 1,282]

16 hours ago, Book said:

Perhaps this lull will lead to the committee rethinking that more obvious candidates will be chosen in the future, that the list will be open to people like Deborah James, George Pérez or Gary Burgess, for example. They would have scored well this year, the chart would have had 7 hits in 7 months and no one would complain now 

I would have complained about non- famous people being on the list :-).

Gary Burgess was not famous, even in death.

Deborah James only got the saturation coverage because she was a BBC staffer and the BBC always thinks news about itself and its people is the most important thing in the world (look at the site today, a war in Europe, a new PM being chosen, the economy tanking and it leads with Vanessa Feltz leaving her job!). The fact that she was relatively young and pretty probably helped.

I'd never heard of George Perez until 7m ago but I appreciate he may have been famous in America.

 

The main list should have genuinely famous people, even if not many of them die.

[Philip 121]

Bernard Cribbins is a big miss for the list.

[ThereWillBeDeaths7 722]

There are currently thirty (!) breathing nonagenarians on this years list, a couple of which weren't even expected to see 2020 (Phillips, Barker etc.) let alone mid-2022. Same for Pelé who would undoubtedly be seen as a big miss had he not been selected this year. Just goes to show you can shove as many elderly famous "too big to miss" people on a list as you want, people will go when they go, with no certainty of a high hit count end of year.

[arghton 6,716]

Cribbins didn't seem in bad health at the start of the year. James Caan could still stand and walk in pictures from February. Deborah, George and Gary just seem very boring to me. And a lot of the other ones called "big misses" just didn't seem in bad health at the start of the year.

 

My opinion on why we haven't had a lot of hits this year? The old coffin teases aren't dying. Last year Philip, Dole, Bouteflika and Greaves died. Kissinger, Barker, Carter, Phillips, Delors, arguably also Godard, Kundera and Gorby are still alive. The last two are in such bad health I would be suprised if they made it to 2023. 

 

21 hours ago, gcreptile said:

Some of the names on our teams also happen to be on the deathlist, like Jerry Lee Lewis, who seems to be doing far better than he "should". Nigel Starmer-Smith looked extremely terrible and I am a little amazed he's not dead yet, and Pelé was a must for the list, too big to miss, and still seems a plausible name for 2022, and probably a very safe bet for 2023.

I agree with all of this, I still don't properly know who Starmer-Smith is except that he's a rugby guy, but I read about his health, declined really fastly last year and I doubt he'll be alive on New Year's Eve, Jerry Lee Lewis looked like a corpse in that October video taken around when he was suffering from some unknown complications. He's still really frail, 86-year-old former hard drug addict, smoker and heavy drinker and I think he could die any day but he's much less dying than he was half a year ago. 

[ladyfiona 2,579]

Bernard Cribbins was seen filming Doctor Who just under a month ago. Yes in a wheelchair but I wasn't expecting it that soon.

[msc 18,439]

8 hours ago, Great Uncle Bulgaria said:

I would have complained about non- famous people being on the list :-).

Gary Burgess was not famous, even in death.

Deborah James only got the saturation coverage because she was a BBC staffer and the BBC always thinks news about itself and its people is the most important thing in the world (look at the site today, a war in Europe, a new PM being chosen, the economy tanking and it leads with Vanessa Feltz leaving her job!). The fact that she was relatively young and pretty probably helped.

I'd never heard of George Perez until 7m ago but I appreciate he may have been famous in America.

 

The main list should have genuinely famous people, even if not many of them die.

 

In general I agree about them not being big enough for the DL.

 

On Perez, I hadn't heard of him till he got ill, but then I saw all the comic book fans I know posting about it. And, the wean started telling me about Perez's characters as apparently  they are quite big with kids. Cyborg apparently. Anyhow I judged that's just something big that passed me by. Happens a lot!

 

tbh I can't really think of any actual misses this year. A lot of "damn they'd have been a good DL name one day" folk but that's about it.

[MortalCaso 1,625]

Different way of going about it. With only 4 deaths so far from the DL, what were some bad picks?

 

Hindsight being 20/20 that is.