K is for Kill

Yet another wondrous word, kill can be used in quite a few ways. I intend to look at a few of them, but will surely forget one or two, as is par for the course.

Kill, as usually used, means to take a life. Any life will do, too: plants, animals, humans, fish... yes, I know fish are animals. But they have no legs and are slimy. At any rate, if you cause a living thing to die, you have killed it.

But you can also kill processes on, say, computers. Have you ever hit Control-Alt-Del and manually ended a process that was stuck or otherwise unwanted? You’ve killed that process, even though it didn’t die. So, another usage for kill could be end. In Linux, the command is actually kill if you want to end a process.

Another usage of the word might be waste. Have you ever killed time? Sure you have, and of course that doesn’t mean you found the source of all time and literally ended it, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog and you wouldn’t be pretending to read it. Killing time simply means you are wasting it, usually while waiting for another event, like an appointment or drugs.

I’m just killing time until my meth dealer arrives.

And, somehow, even though we aren’t supposed to laugh at funerals, the word kill is often associated with comedy. Dude, yer killin’ me, here!

Carrot Top kills it every time he’s on stage!

Omg, I was dying when he acted out that one part.

So, death is actually funny, we just won’t admit it.

It can also mean to finish quickly. I know, that’s freaking weird, but it’s true. Bro, you just killed that pitcher of Bud! Well, nobody would say he killed it if it took him all night to drink it, so we can infer that he consumed it at an accelerated pace.

In most movies, it means Let them live. 

Allow me to explain. Bad Guy 1 and Bad Guy 2 have Good Guys 1 and 2 tied up to chairs in a secret dungeon only three Russians and one random girl know about. Bad Guy 1 says to Bad Guy 2, “What should we do with these two?”

Bad guy 2 responds, “Keel dem.” He then turns and exits the dingy room, putting his designer black leather gloves back on while he walks.

Bad Guy 1 then smiles, looks at the good guys, and cuts them free so he can torture them at another location, all while revealing all their diabolical plans and allowing an inevitable escape en route. They never die, so the only thing that Keel dem can mean is Let them live.