Plan B Forum

so I will ask this question here in its own thread...

Why do they use the term "burned alive"? Isn't that the same as saying a person was shot alive or someone was beaten alive?

How about A live man fell and broke his neck?

A man was Crushed alive by a falling tree?

Wouldn't it make more sense to say "Woman Dies after Being Found Lying Near Her Burning Car"?

That seems to be what actually happened if you read the article that I'm referring to...

not one of your best efforts joe.

heat is the only feeling that your nerves can t adjust to.

wesw wrote:not one of your best efforts joe.

heat is the only feeling that your nerves can t adjust to.

Is that your final answer?

You still have a lifeline and/or you can ask the audience...

that s what they taught me in school. could be wrong, it was a long time ago. the body can adjust to pain, but heat is felt no matter what. something about synapses....

feel free to disabuse me of the notion....

I believe burning is agonizing because there are so many nerve endings close to the skin, for obvious reasons.

I'm not sure that the body adapts to other kinds of pain (at least not in healthy ways), but the degree of intensity may be less pronounced than that which is experienced by a burn victim.

It's usually given in contrast to freezing where the body goes numb. And other methods tend to rapidly kill or destroy nerve endindings or at least allow shock to set in.

Perhaps some overthinking? The term, as I understand it, is not emphasizing the cause of death (as in "shot dead" contrasted with "shot alive". It is emphasizing the horror of a conscious person being set on fire as opposed to (say) a dead body being set on fire.

A person who dies of smoke inhalation in a burning house is not "burnt alive". The dead body is burned which is nasty but not relevant.

This poor young lady apparently was fully aware of what was happening - that her body was blazing and she was in horrible pain. She burned alive. She got out of the car, trying to walk away with 98% of her body burned. She was alive still. She died in the hospital despite efforts to save her. In fact, she was not actually burned to death. She died of the effects of having been burned alive.

To trivialize slightly, the three trolls were intent on roasting the dwarves alive on their spit. They would have been roasted to death if not for a timely intervention. They could have killed the dwarves and then roasted them - in which case the description would be different and the horror of the event reduced.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. . .

Tolkien!

What MGM said.

Other than being burned alive, all the thing listed that make you "dead" happens reletively quickly and are "one shot" occurances. That is, the cause of death is not onging.

Burning to death implies that you are alive while the process that is killing you (burning) is going on. It takes some time before you burn to death and while that is happening the pain is incredible.

Of all the ways to go, that is not one I would choose.