Seeking public attitudes toward the right-to-die, 200 randomly selected residents of a midwestern city were interviewed by telephone in 1990. 90% favoured some kind of personal control over death circumstances. With semantics as an independent variable (euthanasia, mercy killing, physician-assisted suicide, or some form of personal control over death) only the group to whom “physician-assisted suicide” had been presented as a choice said “no” or “probably not” to a legalization question.