Posthumous and Posthumously

Posthumous and Posthumously Posthumous and Posthumously Posthumous and Posthumously By Maeve Maddox Researching another topic altogether, I came across this startling use of the word posthumously: Nicholas Schmidle, whose narrative account of the death of Osama bin was completed without ever interviewing any members of SEAL Team 6, posthumously wrote an article entitled â€Å"In the Crosshairs’’ in The New Yorker. Posthumously means â€Å"after death.† An article may be published posthumously, but writing one posthumously would be quite a feat. The adjective posthumous is applied to an action or reputation occurring, arising, or continuing after death. For example, John Kennedy Toole acquired a posthumous reputation for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which wasn’t published until eleven years after his death. Posthumously, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Or perhaps the passive would be better here: He was awarded the prize posthumously. The word comes from the classical Latin adjective postumus that was used to describe a child born after the father’s death. The h in the English word may be the result of folk etymology by association with the word humus (earth), or by someone’s learned desire to associate it with the Latin verb humare, â€Å"to bury.† Here are examples of posthumous and posthumously used correctly on the Web: Murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were posthumously promoted to the rank of detective. The posthumous birth of a child has been a common occurrence throughout human history, but now â€Å"posthumous conception† has become possible. The technology that permits parents to bank sperm and eggs for later use has created legal problems no one could have anticipated a few decades ago. I did find this quotation in which the word posthumously is used in an unexpected way: Novelist Nadine Gordimer told writer Christopher Hitchens that â€Å"A serious person should try to write posthumously.† Hitchens interpreted her unusual use of the word to mean to write as if the â€Å"usual constraints of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion- did not operate.† Bottom line: Ordinarily, people who are still alive can’t do anything posthumously. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Misused Words category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:How to Punctuate References to Dates and Times55 Boxing Idioms40 Irregular Verbs That Can End in â€Å"-t†