Snapping someone’s neck is a euphemism.

The thing in movies, in games, where you sneak up behind someone and snap their neck and they’re dead and they were a person once and they grew up however many years until however old they were and they were a person and they knew other people and now they’re meat because you killed them by snapping their neck and now they’re dead, that’s a euphemism.

(And a play/plot mechanic.)

It’s a euphemism for the actual reliable, quiet method of killing someone from behind, or after you dominate them in a fight - choking them to death. The Vulcan Nerve Pinch was another euphemism, older and more delicate.

Choking people to death kills them just as much, but being sure about it involves being in intimate contact with someone’s body for say three minutes as it becomes a corpse.

Do you have a sense of how long three minutes is? Here.

I’ll wait.

There are two “chokes” that work the same way, by depriving the brain of oxygen. There’s the “air choke”, which is to block the flow of air into the lungs by constricting the windpipe. People will struggle a while because they’ll still be conscious as long as they can draw down the oxygen already in the bloodstream, but as long as you control the windpipe they can’t draw attention by vocalizing.

You can attack the windpipe by crushing it, or by cutting it open, but it’s got the best boneless armor on the body and unless you follow through lethality’s iffy. That thing on Xena where she chopped someone and they couldn’t breathe but then she could chop them again and they could? That was just a thing on Xena.

The second choke is the “blood choke”, where you constrict the carotid arteries of the neck, so blood can’t get to the brain to deliver oxygen. That causes unconsciousness quicker, but to implement it you’ve got to control both sides of the neck. Cutting works better here, even if you only get one you can drop blood pressure enough. Messy, though.

From there, it’s only three minutes.