Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:
René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.
These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.
FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?
“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.
Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:
- alive (or at least active) now, and
- capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.
A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.
That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:
- “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”
Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.
Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.
But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?