American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  The NED says that madam early acquired a derogatory significance in England, “more or less” because of “prejudice against foreign women.” Grose, in 1785, defined it as “a kept madam [sic], a kept mistress.” In the United States, probably in the Civil War era, it acquired the special meaning of a brothel-keeper, and so went definitely below the salt.3 The colored folk, however, still retain it as a label for a conspicuous woman of their race, say, a popular singer or the proprietor of a successful business. In the early days of the Republic Lady was in common use to designate the wife of the President. Lady Washington, indeed, was heard much oftener than Mrs. Washington, and the honorific remained popular until the days of Lady Jackson. During the years before the Civil War Lady of the White House became the usual designation of any woman serving as the President’s chatelaine, not being his wife. In 1861, as the DAE shows, General George B. McClellan was speaking of Mrs. Lincoln as the Lady President, but that designation seems to have passed out quickly. When First Lady arose I do not know, but it goes back at least to the time of Grover Cleveland’s marriage in the White House in 1885. At the start the usual form was First Lady of the Land, but in the course of time the second element dropped off.

  6. EUPHEMISMS

  285. [Realtor.] The history of this elegant term, which was invented by Charles N. Chadbourn of Minneapolis in 1915 and adopted formally in 1916, is given in AL4, pp. 285–87. Its use is restricted to members of the constituent boards of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, now numbering more than 16,000 ethical and advanced-thinking real-estate agents organized into nearly 500 boards.1 In its early days it was frequently assumed without authority by non-members, but a series of legal battles that began in 1925 and ended triumphantly in 1936 disposed of this effrontery, and rump realtors have now pretty well disappeared. The insigne of the association, an oval design showing both a suburban home and a skyscraper in silhouette, with the words “Realtors Are Active Members of Constituent Boards” across it, has been registered as a trade-mark, and fifteen different courts have held that the association is seized and possessed of “the exclusive property right to the term realtor.” In addition, “numerous State commissions which issue real-estate licenses have ruled that the unauthorized use of … realtor constitutes misrepresentation to the public.” These quotations are from a pamphlet entitled “Realtor: Its Meaning and Use,” issued by the association for the information and inspiration of members. From the same pamphlet I take the following “Word to Editors”:

  The term or symbol realtor should never be used in any publication, or in any other manner, in connection with the name of any person, firm, corporation or any other organization not affiliated with the National Association of Real Estate Boards. The term is not a word of the common language and should not be used as a synonym for real estate agent.2

  The rules of the association forbid its use in the corporate name of any company qualified for membership, but it may be used in the name of a constituent real-estate board. All persons interested are advised that “it should always be capitalized in order to manifest its distinctive character and because of its inclusion in various registrations.” In the conduct of his business a realtor is bound by much stricter rules than incommode an ordinary business man; in fact, he is cribbed, cabined and confined in a way that almost suggests the harsh working conditions of a justice of the Supreme Court or an archbishop. Thus the preamble to the Realtor’s Code of Ethics adopted at a convention of the association on June 6, 1924:

  Under all is the land. Upon its wise utilization and widely allocated ownership depend the survival and growth of free institutions and of our civilization. The Realtor is the instrumentality through which the land resource of the nation reaches its highest use and through which land ownership attains its widest distributions. He is a creator of homes, a builder of cities, a developer of industries, and productive farms.

  Such functions impose obligations beyond those of ordinary commerce; they impose grave social responsibility and a patriotic duty to which the Realtor should dedicate himself, and for which he should be diligent in preparing himself. The Realtor, therefore, is zealous to maintain and improve the standards of his calling and shares with his fellow-Realtors a common responsibility for its integrity and honor.

  In the interpretation of his obligation, he can take no safer guide than that which has been handed down through twenty centuries, embodied in the Golden Rule:

  “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also unto them.”

  Accepting this standard as his own, every Realtor pledges himself to observe its spirit in all his dealings.

  The suggestion that realtor is derived from two Spanish words, real, meaning royal, and toro, a bull, and that it thus connotes royal bull, is spurned by the bearers of the name. Mr. Chadbourn’s own account of its etymology is as follows:

  Real estate originally meant royal grant. It is so connected with land in the public mind that realtor is easily understood, even at a first hearing. Or is a suffix meaning a doer, one who performs an act, as grantor, executor, sponsor, administrator. Realtor: a doer in real estate.1

  The official pronunciation is not realtor, but reel-tor.2 The agent suffix -or has always conveyed a more dignified suggestion in English than the allied -er, perhaps because it often represents the Latin -ator or the French -eur. Professor, to most persons who use the language, is not only superior in meaning to teacher, but also in aspect and atmosphere, and in the same way author stands above writer. When, in 1865, the male hairdressers of England formed a British Hairdressers’

  Academy and began giving demonstrations of their art at the Hanover Square Rooms in London, they let it be known that they desired to be called expositors. Unhappily, the newspaper wits of the time poked fun at this pretension, and in a little while they were reduced to the estate of dressers, and their effort to glorify their science came such a cropper that they had to abandon their demonstrations.1 In this great free republic there is less hostility to human aspiration, and in consequence there have been a number of imitations of realtor, e.g., insuror (an insurance agent),2 furnitor (a furniture dealer),3 merchantor (a member of the merchants’ bureau of a chamber of commerce), avigator (an airplane pilot),4 publicator (a press-agent),5 and weldor.6 In 1924, inflamed by the vast success of realtor in the United States, some of the more idealistic English real-estate men, members of the Institute of Estate Agents and Auctioneers, began calling themselves estators, but the term never came into general use. Realtor has also bred realtress, but it does not seem to be in wide use, though there are many lady realtors.7 The radio trade has a long list of terms in -or, but they are applied to mechanical contrivances, not to God’s children, e.g., resistor, inductor, capacitator and arrestor, the last an elegant substitute for the earlier lightning-arrester, which is traced by the DAE to 1860 and is probably an Americanism.8

  287. [Mortician was suggested by physician, for undertakers naturally admire and like to pal with the resurrection men.]1 From the earliest days they have sought to bedizen their hocus-pocus with mellifluous euphemisms, but it was during the Civil War that they undertook their first really radical reform of its terms. It was then, I believe, that the term casket was first substituted for coffin, which the NED traces to 1525. Many purists did not like it, and one of them was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who thus denounced it in “Our Old Home,” 1863:

  Caskets! — a vile modern phrase [sic] which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink more disgustfully than ever before from the idea of being buried at all.

  But casket quickly made its way, and since the early 80s it is highly improbable that coffin has ever appeared in an American undertaker’s advertisement or in a newspaper account of the funeral of anyone above the dignity of an executed murderer. There were nascent morticians, in the Civil War era, who preferred case, especially for a metallic coffin,2 but casket gradually prevailed, and it remains in almost universal use to this day, though there are poetic
morticians who root for slumber-cot. Before the Civil War the embalming of the dead was not much practised in the United States,3 but in the course of that struggle the job of bringing home dead soldiers from distant battlefields, perhaps in warm weather, forced its introduction. All the pioneer embalmers of the time called themselves Dr., but for some reason unknown (maybe the opposition of the medical men) that title was soon dropped, and today even the most high-toned picklers of the departed are content to be sanitarians. Dr. Charles Mayo, an English physician who made a tour of the United States in 1862 and 1863, thus recorded his observations in Washington:

  The streets bristled with great placards informing you that Dr. A. or Dr. B. would embalm you better than anybody else, and moreover that the Drs. would undertake to make you comfortable in a patent metallic burial case, or contract for your coffin and fixings in any style. Those who had been lucky published a list of their distinguished patrons; a dead general was a great catch, and was immediately announced in the newspapers. I often saw the process: it consisted simply of the injection of a common antiseptic fluid into the femoral artery. Touters in the employ of these harpies followed the rear of the army, and their notices were stuck up at every steamboat wharf, railway station, or other available place near the camp. The effect of these announcements can hardly have been encouraging to the men at first; fortunately for them, however, they soon got accustomed to anything.1

  The newspapers of all the towns near battle-fronts were full of the advertisements of these Drs. Here, for example, is one that appeared in the Nashville Press and Times on October 21, 1865, after the war was over and bereaved relatives from the North were flocking into the area in the hope of recovering the bodies of fallen soldiers:

  Disinterring Deceased Soldiers

  Dr. Prunk

  has established reliable agents at Chattanooga, Tenn., Atlanta, Macon, Andersonville, Ga., and Huntsville, Ala., who have access to all the burial records to enable them to establish the identity of bodies, in order that they may be able to forward the remains of deceased soldiers there, as well as all intermediate points, with promptness.

  As the time is short, in this warm climate, in which bodies can be removed, and the probability of the head-boards being defaced, policy dictates to you to attend to the removal of your friends this Winter.

  Headquarters: Nashville, Tenn., Cherry street, five doors south of the postoffice.

  Metallic cases and fine coffins on hand.

  D. H. Prunk

  Licensed Embalmer.

  The DAE’s earliest example of mortician comes from an advertisement in the Columbus (O.) Dispatch of August 14, 1895, which was only six months after the term was launched by the Embalmer’s Monthly?2 But it was not until September 17, 1917 that 200 of the most eminent American undertakers banded themselves into an organization called the National Selected Morticians,3 and began to strike out for a general reform of necrophoric nomenclature.4 Some of their inventions are now familiar — patient or case for body; funeral-car, casket-coach or ambulance for hearse; negligée, slumber-robe or slumber-shirt for shroud; slumber-room, reposing-room, chapel, funeral-home or funeral-residence for funeral-parlor or undertaking establishment; operating-parlor, operating-room, preparing-room or preparation-room for the cellar in which the embalmer does his work; service-car for dead-wagon; limousine for mourners’-coach,1 and so on. In September, 1935, a Washington mortician was advertising by cards in the local trolley-cars that the reposing-rooms in his funeral-home were “Autumn-breezed by the finest air-conditioning equipment.”2 Four years later the term mortician got official recognition in a report of the Bureau of the Census,3 and three years after that the more elegant members of the profession in the District of Columbia tried to induce Congress to pass an act providing for the examination and licensing of its practitioners. This proposal was energetically opposed by the common run of Washington undertakers, who alleged that it was inspired by an effort of “a small minority of morticians to gain control of the profession in the District.”4 At least one mortician has promoted himself to the estate and dignity of a mortuary consultant,5 and another has become a funeral counselor,6 but so far I have heard of none who calls himself a mortuary, obituary or obsequial engineer. No doubt it will come. Meanwhile, the owners and press-agents of places of sepulchre have followed their associates into the flowery fields of euphemism. Graveyards, in all the more progressive parts of the United States, are graveyards no longer, nor even cemeteries, but memorial-parks, burial-abbeys or -cloisters, or mortaria.7 “Before long,” said the before cited Elmer Davis in 1927, “they will probably be calling them memorial-cathedrals.… Ground burial, one learns, is out of date and barbarous; mausoleum entombment is modern, progressive and humanitarian — ‘as sanitary as cremation and as sentimental as a churchyard.’ ” Some of the new mausoleums are structures of great pretentiousness, usually either Gothic or Byzantine in style and as gorgeous as a first-rate filling-station. They flourish especially in Southern California,1 and those of Los Angeles are heavily patronized, for one of the inducements they offer is the chance to store the beloved dead cheek by jowl with a Valentino or a Jean Harlow.

  A correspondent assures me that he saw the sign of a mortician in the town of Driffield in Yorkshire (pop. 6,000) in 1925, but the term has made very little progress among the hunkerous English, who prefer undertaker.2 Funeral director is not listed in the NED, but an older term, funeral undertaker, is traced to 1707. Undertaker itself goes back to 1698. It once had a formidable rival in upholder; the original meaning of which was a dealer in and repairer of old furniture. In that sense upholder is traced by the NED to 1333, but it does not seem to have come into use to designate a funeral contractor until the beginning of the Eighteenth Century. It still survives in England, though it is not in common use; there was a firm of funeral upholders in the Kensington district of London in 1938.3 The art of the undertaker and the trade of the furniture-dealer were often associated in the United States in the Nineteenth Century; in fact, they are still so associated in many small towns. Morgue, to designate a dead-house, was borrowed from the French less than a century ago, and mortuary is even more recent. The NED’s first example of mortuary is dated 1865. Three years later a writer in the London Spectator was sneering at it as the invention of newspaper reporters.4 Crematory is traced by the DAE, in American use, to 1885; the NED traces it to 1876 in England. It is now pretty well supplanted in the United States by the more mellifluous crematorium, which borrows elegance from pastorium, healthatorium, lubritorium, and their congeners.

  The resounding success of mortician brought in many other words in -ician, e.g., beautician, cosmetician, shoetrician, radiotrician, fizzician, locktician, whooptician, linguistician, strategician. They were preceded by stereoptician, a tony name for the operator of a stereopticon, recorded by the DAE in 1887. Who invented beautician I do not know, nor the precise time of its invention, but the owner of a beauty salon by the name of Miss Kathryn Ann, at 214 Seventy-first Euclid Building, Cleveland, O., was advertising in the November, 1924 issue of the Cleveland telephone directory that she had a staff of “very efficient beauticians.”1 By 1926 Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, was reporting in the American Mercury2 that beauticians, cosmeticians and cosmetologists were in practise from end to end of the country, and that nine States had already passed acts providing for their examination, licensing and regulation. Other States followed soon afterward, but it was not until May 5, 1938 that Congress took cognizance of the new art and mystery by passing H.R. 6869, which created “a District of Columbia Board of Cosmetology … to regulate the occupation and practise,” and laid down the following definition:

  The word cosmetology, as used in this act, shall be defined and construed to mean any one or any combination of practices generally and usually, heretofore and hereafter, performed by, and known as the occupation of beauty culturists or cosmeticians, or cosmetologists, or hairdressers, or of any other pe
rsons holding him or herself out as practicing cosmetology by whatever designation and within the meaning of this act and in and upon whatever place or premises; and in particular cosmetology shall be defined and shall include, but otherwise not be limited thereby, the following or any one or a combination of practices, to wit: Arranging, dressing, styling, curling, waving, cleansing, cutting, removing, singeing, bleaching, coloring, or similar work upon the hair of any person by any means, and with hands or mechanical or electrical apparatus or appliances, or by the use of cosmetic preparations, antiseptics, tonics, lotions, or creams, massaging, cleansing, stimulating, exercising, beautifying, or similar work, the scalp, face, neck, arms, bust, or upper part of the body, or manicuring the nails of any person, exclusive of such of the foregoing practices as come within the scope of the Healing Arts Practice Act in force in the District of Columbia at the time of the passage of this act.

  Beautician reached England by 1937, but it was apparently collared there by beauty-preparation manufacturers, who also tried to lay hands on cosmetician.1 In the United States both seem to be yielding to cosmetologist, and the chief organization of the beauty-shop operators is called the National Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. In Boston, in 1935, a lady specializing in “tinting hair for Boston’s most discriminating women” began to call herself a canitist,2 and in Australia there is a tony beautician who uses the Frenchy designation of cosmetiste,3 but neither term has swept the American profession. In my youth the dens of lady hairdressers were called simply hair dressing-parlors, but beauty-parlor began to appear before World War I, and soon afterward it was displaced by beauty-shop. Sometimes the latter is spelled beauty-shoppe, or even beauté-shoppe. The girls have produced a considerable vocabulary of elegant terms to designate their operations, e.g., to youthify, and some of their literati begin to talk of such metaphysical things as beauty characterology.4