Does "people" necessarily mean "living persons"?
If you refer to people in a room, does that imply that those people are alive?
If you said:
People in a boardroom
It is reasonable to assume they are alive, but I am not sure if its implied.
Conversely, if you said:
People in a cemetery
It may be assumed that they are dead, but again, I am unsure if that is implied.
Clarification would be much appreciated.
To specify a little further as to how this came about, a friend shared a vague riddle someone with me.
If there are four people in a room and you enter the room and two people die, how many people are left in the room.
I said 3 because I assumed people meant alive, but he said 5 because no people (alive or dead) had left the room.
Solution 1:
Actually, I wouldn't assume that if you said people in the cemetery you were talking about the corpses.
I've always thought that, by default, people are alive.
If you're talking about a cemetery, I'd assume you were referring to visitors or mourners.
Even with people in the morgue, I'd assume you were talking about doctors performing autopsies, or police or family members identifying cadavers.
I think the safest assumption would always be that people refers to the living.
To convey the opposite, either say dead people or use some specific contextual phrasing:
The only people in the cemetery were the corpses.
Also, what you are actually implying is hopefully mirrored in the words you use to express yourself, but words themselves don't actually imply anything.
It's the writers of words who do the implying—and they use appropriate or inappropriate words for their purpose.
Conversely, readers of words infer meaning from their own understanding of the words that were used.
Ideally, both people have the same understanding of the words used, and the inference matches the implication.
(Some people might debate me over this, given the fourth sense of the definition of imply here, but I find it logically inconsistent for somebody to say that agentless words can imply something when, in order to say that, they have to first infer a meaning. It seems to me that they are simply assuming what the author had meant to imply. I think that fourth sense of imply is a bit suspect on analysis—although I can see why people might use it that way.)
Solution 2:
The term 'people' implies a single state, that is 'alive'. But when add a specific word (e.g. Corpses) or add adjectives (e.g. Buried or dead) before the term 'people' that describes it as 'dead', implies dead state.
- People in a boardroom [alive].
- Dead people in a boardroom [dead, as it has adjective].
- Corpses in a boardroom [dead].
- People in a cemetry [if you meant to say dead ones, here it is incorrect].
Thus it would be correct to add adjective before the term 'people': dead/buried people in a cemetry.
Additionally, rather use the term 'corpses' to avoid verbosity e.g. Corpses in a cemetry.