§4
Euphemisms and Forbidden Words—But such euphemisms as lady-clerk are, after all, much rarer in English than in American usage. The Englishman seldom tries to gloss menial occupa- tions with sonorous names; on the contrary, he seems to delight in keeping their menial character plain. He says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have servants; the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He uses employé in place of clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True enough he calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is probably because even a boarder may be a gentleman. Just as he avoids calling a fast train the limited, the flier or the cannon-ball, so he never calls an undertaker a funeral director or mortician,[1] or a dentist a dental surgeon or ontologist, or an optician an optometrist, or a barber shop (he always makes it barber's shop) a tonsorial parlor, or a common public-house a café, a restaurant, an exchange, a buffet or a hotel, or a tradesman a storekeeper or merchant, or a fresh-water college a university. A university, in England, always means a collection of colleges.[2] He avoids displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance with others less brutal, or thought to be less brutal, e. g., ready- to-wear or ready-tailored for ready-made, used or slightly-used for second-hand, mahoganized for imitation-mahogany, aisle manager for floor-walker (he makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop. Also, he is careful not to use such words as rector, deacon and baccalaureate in merely rhetorical senses.[3]
- ↑ In the 60's an undertaker was often called an embalming surgeon in America.
- ↑ In a list of American "universites" I find the Christian of Canton, Mo., with 125 students; the Lincoln, of Pennsylvania, with 184; the Southwestern Presbyterian, of Clarksville, Tenn., with 86; and the Newton Theological, with 77. Most of these, of course, are merely country high-schools.
- ↑ The Rev. John C. Stephenson in the New York Sun, July 10, 1914: …"that empty courtesy of addressing every clergyman as Doctor.... And let us abolish the abuse of…baccalaureate sermons for sermons before graduating classes of high schools and the like."
