I learned a new word last week.

Deleb.

According to Forbes magazine, “deleb” is a term used by “industry insiders” to refer to a dead celebrity.

Forbes released its annual ranking of the “Top-Earning Delebs,” and apparently a lot of people were surprised that Michael Jackson placed no higher than third on the list.

Give the guy a break. He died only four months ago.

Call me a Pollyanna, but I think it’s too early to tell whether Jackson has failed at being dead or not.

Let’s reserve judgment until we see the grosses from “This Is It,” which opened Wednesday.

Strange stuff, this deleb list.

Some of the media outlets that have written about the list have treated it as if it’s something someone might want to be on.

ABC News titled its Web article, “The Richest Dead Celebrities,” a phrase that doesn’t seem here to be rich in irony, so it must be rich in oxymora.

Whatever our theology, there’s at least one thing we can all agree on: You can’t take it with you.

Nobody gets rich being dead.

It reminds me of a quote (perhaps apocryphal) from R&B singer Big Mama Thornton, who recorded the song “Hound Dog” three years before Elvis Presley and was allegedly paid only $50.

Someone once asked her after Presley’s death how she felt about all the millions of dollars Presley had earned from the song. And she said, “Honey, I’m still here to spend my fifty dollars.”

The people who spend the money “earned” by dead celebrities are not on the dead celebrities list.

Like Jackson’s never-boring father, Joe, who (according to the Chicago Sun Times) was paid $250,000 to introduce London screenings of the concert film his son never intended to make.

And the Jackson family patriarch reportedly charged up to $3,000 to get in to a “This Is It” VIP party at the Palms hotel in Las Vegas, where people could eat dinner with him while watching the movie.

So I guess those oh-so-savory proceeds will figure in to where Michael Jackson places on next year’s deleb list.

Jackson’s feelings toward his strict father were ambivalent at best, so one wonders how happy he’d be with the news that his father is making money in this way.

That’s the problem with getting too excited on behalf of a dead celebrity who has earned a lot. The folks who are getting rich could conceivably be people the celebrity hated in life.

Everybody who has made money off Jackson in the past four months has claimed to have his best interests at heart.

For example, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Jackson’s onetime confidante and spiritual adviser.

After Jackson’s death, Boteach speedily assembled a book based on 30 hours of taped interviews with the self-described King of Pop.

Boteach has claimed his book was released to increase understanding, not expand his own coffers, and perhaps that’s the truth.

But aren’t spiritual advisers, regardless of religious orientation, supposed to keep those sorts of secrets? As in, keep them forever?

There is supposedly all this unreleased music out there, but the “new” single “This Is It” – a song Jackson was so proud of he tried to keep it hidden for 26 years – is pretty weak sauce.

How often in the history of dead musicians has music that didn’t make the cut when the artist was alive turned out to be worth listening to?

And representatives of AEG, the company that bankrolled the series of live concerts that never came to be, have said that “This Is It” will show that Jackson wasn’t exploited during rehearsals.

Let me get this straight: Here is a film that was quickly constructed to take advantage of still-fresh shock over the death of a pop star and consists of footage that the pop star never intended to be seen by the general public, and part of its purpose is to prove its makers didn’t exploit that pop star?

That’s what being a deleb means: People make all sorts of dodgy decisions in your memory and then have press conferences where they smile and say, “This is what he would have wanted.”

Web exclusive

This week’s Web exclusive is a tribute to Maryamber Bosk, a beloved local actress who died Oct. 17. You can find it at The Journal Gazette arts and entertainment blog, Get a Load of This, at www.journalgazette.net/getaload.