A former colleague has contacted me to say that in the legal world ‘strangle’ no longer means to choke someone to death. There’s a new law of ‘non-fatal strangulation’.
This really jars with me, and to my mind it is simply legitimising a wrong usage. As far as I am concerned ‘to strangle’ still means ‘to kill by compressing the windpipe’; therefore you cannot say ‘a woman was strangled until she passed out’. Nor can you say ‘a woman was strangled to death’. If you need it, use ‘throttle’, which means ‘to kill or injure by squeezing the throat’, or ‘choke’, which means to obstruct breathing but is not necessarily fatal.