Simultaneity
In the introduction to the new translation of Don Quixote I was talking about a couple of entries back, Harold Bloom observes:

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.

I was struck by Bloom's use of the word simultaneously, and I imagined the dying Shakespeare and Cervantes lying in their respective beds, with observers standing by, chronometers in hand, ready to record their expiration dates to three significant figures.

The word to me carries the connotation of a fairly narrow synchronism. How synchronous, I can't tell, but I wouldn't find myself using the term to describe two events if they're temporally separated by more than, say, a few seconds. (I suppose that by qualifying the simultaneity with almost, I could increase that margin by another handful of seconds.)

Cervantes died on April 22nd, 1616; Shakespeare died the following day. I guess that on a cosmic temporal scale, these two events almost collapse onto each other, but that doesn't stop Bloom's description from sounding odd to me. I turned to the OED, which offers the following:

simultaneously, adv.
1. At the same time; coincidently.
2. By means of simultaneous equations.

The examples illustrating the first sense, which is the one that concerns us, do not elucidate much, as they seem to apply to events more temporally aligned than the possibly one-day span separating the two deaths:

-1675 BAXTER Cath. Theol. I. I. 28 To make the same numerical act which is a Volition simultaneously to be no Volition.
-1762 KAMES Elem. Crit. (1764) I. 127 Dissimilar emotions may succeed each other with rapidity, but they can~not exist simultaneously.
-1763 SHENSTONE Ess., Writing & Bks. lix, He introduces the deities of both acting simultaneously.
-1816 BABBAGE in Phil. Trans. 192 If in the function (x, y) we put simultaneously (x, y) for x, and (x, y) for y.
-1860 TYNDALL Glac. I. ii. 22 An exclamation of surprise burst simultaneously from my companion and myself.
-1880 HAUGHTON Phys. Geogr. v. 242 The actual banks are rarely, if ever, simultaneously visible.

The American Heritage dictionary, however, gives simultaneous as a synonym for contemporary, but then adds the following usage note:

These adjectives mean existing or occurring at the same time. Contemporary is used more often of persons, contemporaneous of events and facts: The composer Salieri was contemporary with Mozart. A rise in interest rates is often contemporaneous with an increase in inflation. Simultaneous more narrowly specifies occurrence of events at the same time: The activists organized simultaneous demonstrations in many major cities.

So, Bloom's usage still strikes me as odd or hyperbolic, but if anyone gets a different impression, I'd like to hear it.