Animating life—What's the deal with this particularly blatant tautology? Life, creaturely or otherwise, would not be life if it weren't already animate; animacy is the defining characteristic of life. As we learn from the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "animacy" can refer to a) the general "quality or condition of being alive or animate" or b), of its use in linguistics, to the "fact or quality of denoting a living thing" and the "classification or ranking of words or their referents on this basis' (Animacy 2016).