Trope-a-Day: Only Mostly Dead

Only Mostly Dead: Slightly alive.

Namely, the state between corporeal death (what medical science, say today, calls “dead”), and the point at which your brain has decayed sufficiently that the very best scanning technology and interpolation can no longer reconstruct a mind-state sufficiently accurate to meet the legal definition of “close enough to you to be you” (information-theoretic death).

The degree to which I regret that prior usage prevents me from actually calling this state “only mostly dead” in-universe cannot possibly be overestimated.