Sometimes, you just have to call things as they are. That’s why we have language, folks – descriptive words that name reality, not skirt around it. Certain words are meant to be deeply confronting and downright uncomfortable.

Yes, even in our age of technology where we can take the edge off loads of different feelings, we can’t soften the blow of real life – or, should I say, death – and the language we use plays a big part in how we deal with it all.

As a journalist, I’ve always been aware of the power and emotional weight that words carry but, as I discovered last year, there were certain ones I had a tendency to avoid myself. I attended a suicide intervention course, where one of the first myths dismantled was the idea that you should avoid directly saying the S-word.

Prior to this training, I believed that simply saying ‘suicide’ might trigger someone you are worried about, that the very act of uttering it out loud might somehow plant the idea of ending their lives in someone’s head.

I learned it doesn’t – but what it does is force clarity and honesty in what could potentially be a life or death situation.

I was reminded of how important it is not to faff about when it comes to talking about death again this week, when plummy TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp sparked a fierce online debate by calling out Bafta for using the word ‘passing’ instead of ‘death’ to mourn the late actress Penelope Keith.

Now, Kirstie would be partial to a tantrum or two – she infamously smashed her children’s iPads after they broke her screen time rules back in 2018 – so when she purported to have ‘stumbled across the most divisive issue of all time’, I was initially sceptical.

But while I might disagree with her extreme parenting (out of practicality more than anything else; God knows I’d love to smash my own children’s devices), I concur with Kirstie on the necessity of using appropriate language when talking about death.

Bafta may indeed have thought they were paying tribute to the late, great Good Life star, but the wording of their post on social media – full of polite euphemism as it was – somewhat diminished the finality and respect of which it was deserving.

‘We’re saddened to learn of the passing of Dame Penelope Keith, aged 86,’ it read, to which Allsopp replied: “It’s ‘death’... Dame Penelope did not ‘pass’, she was not a car or a bottle of ketchup.”

And guess what? She’s right. She wasn’t. Nor was she trapped wind or a kidney stone, or a car going for an NCT. She’s a person, and she lived and she died.

That’s why Allsopp’s comments that such flippant commentary are attempts to sweep away the profound significance of death resonates. Her point was not complicated, nor especially radical: ‘died’ is not a rude word, and pretending otherwise does not make grief more dignified. If anything, it sweeps grief further under the carpet.

And before we Irish get too smug – we have quite the reputation when it comes to a good send-off – this wasn’t just a peculiarly British outbreak of verbal squeamishness.

We like to believe we have a more grounded relationship with death than many countries, and in many ways we do. The wake, the house full of neighbours, the tea, the sandwiches, the stories, the laughter, the drink and the singsongs – it’s community that has always been central to our Irish goodbyes.

But even here, the rituals of death are changing. More people die in hospitals or care facilities than at home. We watch funerals online and wakes are moving from the good room of the house to funeral homes. And the language of death is following a similarly obscure route.

Look on RIP.ie and you’ll see what I mean. There are swathes of notices that don’t mention death at all. It seems we don’t die any more; we ‘pass’ or ‘slip’ away. People are not dead, they are ‘no longer with us’, as though death were a mildly inconsiderate guest who has left early without saying goodbye and might still return if we are polite enough.

It certainly doesn’t help that we live in a world where everyone is braced to be offended by everything. We seem fearful of other emotionally laden words too – rape becomes sexual assault or non-consensual sex, as though grammatical gentleness might somehow dilute its violence.

But language is not supposed to absorb the shock of something – it’s supposed to accurately describe it.

Even when sharing the worst news with children, the general advice is to be as blunt as possible so they can grasp the finality of death.

Last year, when our dog Elle died, it felt physically painful to tell the children she was dead. I resisted the urge to say she was put to sleep, because she was not. She died, and that truth was heart-wrenching for us all.

We might be living in an age when we can communicate with digital ghosts but the truth is this – grief cannot be filtered down or made more palatable.

It is the language of love and it deserves to be spoken about in the most honest way we can – and if you ask me, correctly validating life’s heaviest loss is the best tribute of all.