August 25, 2006
surely you'd wait till the wake?
Stripping banned at Chinese funerals
“Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai’s rural areas to allure viewers,” Xinhua agency said.
“Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured.”
Filed by billy at 2:40 pm under culture
Comments Off
“Wait ’til the wake”?
A wake involves the body lying in state. Originally the idea was that the person might not really be dead, so the body would not be left alone until people were really, really sure the person wasn’t going to wake up. Hence the name.
A funeral involves burying or otherwise disposing of the body.
So unless you’re going to engage in a bit of grave robbery, the wake is unlikely to come after the funeral.
in my limited experience of our degraded culture, the wake has been the term for the post-funeral piss-up.
I always thought the wake *followed* a funeral (cf “in the wake of XYZ”), while the vigil preceded it. A quick look at the Concise OED offers the definitions that a wake is a vigil, and that a wake is a party following a funeral. At any rate, I was right about meaning and wrong about etymology. (the funeral “wake” is related to words like “awake” and “watch”, but not the “wake” of a ship and related metaphorical use)
I always associated it with the song (as opposed to the novel-like object) Finnegan’s Wake.
In the song, a heavy object falls on Tim Finnegan’s head and he dies. They lay his body out in his bed and have a Wake, an exuberant and drunken affair.
At the end of the song Tim Finnegan wakes up, a wee bit annoyed that everyone thought he was dead, and joins in the party.
I guess the meaning of the word has changed over the years from “Let’s wait and see if Tim wakes up” to “Let’s get drunk and hope Tim doesn’t wake up under the ground!”