word of the day: obsequy

The word of the day is obsequy:

 

noun, plural obsequies. Usually, obsequies

1. a funeral rite or ceremony.

< Late Latin obsequiae, alteration (by confusion with exsequiae funeral rites) of obsequia, plural of Latin obsequium (dictionary.com)


"The implicit comparisons recur in Italy, where the men visit the towns in which the sexual outlaws Byron and Shelley lived, shortly before their deaths.  The comics perform funerary obsequies for the poets and again recite in their own and others' voices.  'The Trip to Italy', for all its japes, is haunted by mortality, as was its namesake, 'Viaggio in Italia' (1954), the Rosselini masterpiece starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman as a warring couple dismally on tour.  Like them, Coogan and Brydon visit the museum at Pompeii, with its plaster casts of the bodies of the dead.  Rosselini showed us a couple who died locked in embrace when Vesuvius exploded, a harsh reflection on the modern couple's marital anguish.  Here, in a blasphemous reduction, Brydon summons his man-in-a-box voice to play a Pompeian lying in a glass case; the two carry on a discreet gay flirtation.  It's not that the end is nigh for these men, but death, for them and for Winterbottom, is always present in life."

 - David Denby, "Lasting impressions: 'The Trip to Italy'", 1 September 2014 The New Yorker