I always thought that's what the word "morbid" was meant to invoke--that their weight is so high that it's deadly. Given that morbid is a word used to describe someone with an unhealthy fascination with death.
Fake edit: ah, it's apparently a medical term as well. Okay, yeah, terminally obese would be better.
The Latin root of the word morbid is -
mort-, which literally means "death." We use "-
mort-" all the time, both in words that refer directly to death, as in
mortuary and
immortal, and in words that we might not usually associate with death, as in
mortify,
mortgage,
moribund, and
amortize. In the latter cases, if you think it through, you can see the connection ("mortify" literally means "scared to death", while "mortgage" literally means "pledge to death" and "moribund" means "at the point of death")
The term "deathfatty" was coined as a play on the root "mort" and the word "obese"
The actual Latin
word that is closest in meaning to morbid is
morbidus, which means "diseased and deathlike" So another way to translate "morbidly obese" would be "diseased fatty"
Eventually,
morbidus came to refer to exhibiting an unhealthy fixation on death and decay, which has remained its English meaning to this day.
I think morbidly obese is a suitable name, but I think that the superfatties need a term of their own. I've been perfectly happy to use "deathfatty" for anyone Becky's size or larger.
In modern medicine, degrees of obesity are often simply classified by class: Class 1, Class 2, Class 3. Class 3 is 40+ BMI, so our favorite deathfatties have eaten themselves well beyond medical classification. I guess they need to think of a new name, or start adding more classes...
