American Language Supplement 1
Page 80
1941. American Magazine, Feb. An odor-engineer’s business is creating sweet-smelling scents to counteract all sorts of unpleasant odors.
Pediatric-engineer. A chiropodist.
1926. New Yorker (quoted in Engineering News-Record, May 27). Dr. M—, Pediatric Engineer; Certificate of Merit for Relieving Foot Trouble. (Sign in a window in Third avenue, New York.)
Sales-engineer. See the quotation.
1939. Terre Haute Star, Jan. 10. John Wesley Coates, nationally known sales-engineer, will instruct sales staffs of Terre Haute stores.
Social-engineer. An uplifter.
1937. P. W. L. Cox and R. E. Langfitt in High School Administration and Supervision. The social-engineer appreciates that one important function of education is the release of the potential energies in human nature.1
1942. Joseph N. Ulman in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, May-June, p. 8. These are problems for the social-engineer rather than for the penologist.
Terminix-engineer. See the quotation.
1937. Louise Pound in American Speech, April, p. 163. Terminix-engineers sell Bonded Terminix in Richmond, Va. (Terminix is an insulation against termites.)
Touchdown-engineer. A football coach.
1939. Title of an article by Fred Russell, Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 30.
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles prepared by the Job Analysis and Information Section of the Division of Standards and Research of the Department of Labor2 lists many curious varieties of engineers. including the rigging-up-engineer, the yarder-engineer and the roader-engineer, but all of them appear to have to do with some form of actual engineering or engine-operation, however lowly, and so their titles, while perhaps rather florid, do not qualify as euphemisms. In this list a sanitary-engineer appears, not as a plumber but as “a civil engineer who designs and supervises the construction and operation of sewers, sewage disposal plants, garbage disposal plants, ventilation tunnels, and other sanitary facilities,” and such savants as the termite-engineer, the social-engineer and the human-engineer are non est. Neither do any of these latter-day wizards appear on the list of engineers employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, though it has room for cost-engineers, erosion-engineers and material engineers.3 The alert Engineering News-Record reported so long ago as October 2, 1924, that the master-bakers of the United States, in convention assembled at Atlantic City, had resolved to organize a Society of Baking-engineers, but if it was ever actually launched it seems to have perished. In the United States Forest Service, according to the News-Record, there is a functionary known as a recreation-engineer, but what his duties are I do not know. The rat, cockroach and bedbug eradicators of the country have had for years an organization called the American Society of Exterminating Engineers. On November 8, 1923 the News-Record reported that one of its members followed the sideline of a mortician in Bristol, Pa., and suggested sportively: “That’s service for you. Kill ’em and bury ’em for the same fee.” But the title of engineer seems to be reserved with some plausibility for the head men of the profession: its lowlier representatives are apparently content to call themselves exterminators, for their union in New York is the Exterminators and Fumigators, Local No. 155. On April 19, 1923, the News-Record reported that the private-car chauffeurs of New York had organized the Society of Professional Automobile Engineers (not to be confused with the Society of Automotive Engineers) and opened a clubhouse, but if that clubhouse still exists it must have a silent telephone, for it is not listed in the Manhattan telephone-book (1944). Perhaps imagineering, which appeared in an advertisement of the Aluminum Company of America in November, 1943, should be noted here. It designates the art and mystery of an engineer who serves the customers of the company by thinking up swell ideas for using aluminum.
My invention of bootician in 1925 strained and indeed exhausted my onomatological faculties, and it was not for fifteen years that I hatched another neologism of the same high tone. Then I was inspired by the following letter from a lady subscribing herself Georgia Sothern and giving her address as Room 408, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York:
I am writing this letter to you because I have read and admired your book on the American language and believe that semantics can be of some help to me.
It happens that I am a practitioner of the fine art of strip-teasing. Strip-teasing is a formal and rhythmic disrobing of the body in public. In recent years there has been a great deal of uninformed criticism levelled against my profession.
Most of it is without foundation and arises because of the unfortunate word strip-teasing, which creates the wrong connotations in the mind of the public.
I feel sure that if you could coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art, the objections to it would vanish and I and my colleagues would have easier going. I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession. Thank you.
I say this charming note inspired me, but as a matter of fact, it also filled me with certain doubts, for I have been long familiar, as a practicing journalist, with the flattering wiles and literary style of public relations counsel.1 But I always answer letters of working-girls politely, however suspicious I may be of their purpose so I replied to La Sothern as follows on April 5, 1940:
I need not tell you that I sympathize with you in your affliction, and wish that I could help you. Unfortunately, no really persuasive new name suggests itself. It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way or other to the associated zoölogical phenomenon of molting. Thus the word moltician comes to mind, but it must be rejected because of its likeness to mortician.
A resort to the scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast. Then there are suggestions in the names of some of the creatures which practise molting. The scientific name for the common crab is Callinectes hastastus, which produces collinectian. Again, there is a family of lizards called the Geckonidae, and their name produces gecko. Perhaps your advisers may be able to find other suggestions in this same general direction.
I heard nothing further from the lady, but in a little while I learned by articles in the public prints that she (or her press-agent) had decided to adopt ecdysiast. It appeared by these articles that two other savants had been consulted — Dr. S. I. Hayakawa, assistant professor of English in the Illinois Institute of Technology and author of “Language in Action,” and Stuart Chase, S.B. cum laude (Harvard), author of “The Economy of Abundance,” “A Honeymoon Experiment,” “Your Money’s Worth,” “The Tyranny of Words,” “Idle Money, Idle Men” and other scientific works. Hayakawa, I gathered, gave La Sothern (or her press-agent) to understand that he had never seen a strip-teaser in action and hence had nothing to offer, and Chase, busy with the salvation of humanity on a dozen fronts, made no reply at all, so I won by a sort of forfeit, and within a few weeks ecdysiast was on its way.1 Soon the British United Press correspondent cabled news of its invention to London, and it was discussed gravely in many of the great English organs of opinion, though strip-teasing itself was prohibited in the British Isles,2 even in Sunday-school entertainments. Meanwhile, La Sothern (or her press-agent) had written to the English Lord Chamberlain, the official censor of stage performances, suggesting that the adoption of ecdysiast might perchance open the way for lifting the ban, and in due course the following reply came from his secretary:
I am desired by the Lord Chamberlain to acknowledge the receipt of your letter on the subject of strip-tease displays, and to inform you that its contents are noted.1
But though Lord Chamberlain’s secretary was thus cagey, the moral element among the English took alarm, and on July 25 the London Reformer printed the following under the heading, “Rose by Any Other Name— ”:
Since conjurors have often been referred to as prestidigiteurs and the classical Greek word terpsichore has been revived for dancing, it was inevitable that someone at some time would glorify the “art?” of strip-tease by a high-sounding nam
e. Now novelist [sic] H. L. Mencken has coined the name of ecdysiast, from the Greek ekdysis (literal translation: a getting out; or, as ecdysis, a zoölogical term for the act of molting) for the strippers. So much has the term caught on that there has already been established — in America, of course — a Society of Ecdysiasts.2
The society, which by 1942 had changed its name (perhaps as the result of a change of press-agents) to the Association of Ecdysiasts, Parade and Specialty Dancers, played an heroic rôle when bands of wowsers in various parts of the United States launched local campaigns to put down strip-teasing as indecent. In Los Angeles, for example, its members undertook to picket the police commissioners when orders were issued prohibiting their art and mystery in the movie Holy Land. Carrying placards reading “L. A. Censors Unfair to Streamlined Ecdysiasts” and “They Got Me Covered & It Ain’t Fair,” a band of them led by a lovely creature by the name of Miss Marie Wilson stormed a session of the commissioners on October 13, 1942, and made headlines in newspapers from Oregon to Maine.3 The police commissioners, fearing that the ladies were about to strip in their audience-chamber, took to the woods, leaving them to a functionary named the Hon. H. F. Lorensen. “We’re not strip-teasers,” they chanted. “We’re ecdysiasts — something that molts or sheds. Ecdysiast comes from the Greek.”4 “Gee!” exclaimed Lorensen, and then departed also, with the commissioner’s studio abandoned to the ecdysiasts, their press-agent, and forty head of reporters and photographers. Most of the newspaper comment upon this uprising was favorable to the ladies. I introduce a specimen from the Middle West:
Here in America, land of the free, a small and persecuted minority cries out for justice. People talk about rehabilitating the okies and the sharecroppers, but do they worry their heads about the ecdysiasts, those hard-working and long-suffering souls? Like other artists, the ecdysiast is highly sensitive and proud. Compensation means less to her than the simple joy of work. Yet society refuses to consider her problem. True, she is not “one-third of a nation.” She is not ill-fed. She is not ill-housed. But she is certainly ill-clothed. What is the New Deal doing about it?1
Rather curiously, the most eminent of all the ecdysiasts, Miss Gypsy Rose Lee, refused to adopt the new name. Interviewed for the New York World-Telegram by H. Allen Smith,2 she let go with the following harsh words:
Ecdysiast, he calls me! Why the man is an intellectual slob. He has been reading books. Dictionaries. We don’t wear feathers and molt them off.… What does he know about stripping?3
Englishmen are a good deal less ashamed of their trades than Americans, and in consequence there is less exuberance of occupational euphemism among them than in this country. But this is certainly not to say that it is lacking altogether. So long ago as the Seventeenth Century some of the more advanced English dressers of female coiffures were calling themselves woman-surgeons,4 and before the end of that century there were English men’s tailors who claimed to be master-fashioners. At this moment many of the buyers and sellers of old clothes in London pass as wardrobe-dealers, and from time to time there are proposals that street-sweeps be outfitted with some more delicate name. When this last matter was under debate in 1934 a provincial borough councillor proposed that highwayman be adopted, but his council turned him down.1 In 1944 the rat-catcher employed by the Westminster County Council was actually turned into a rodent officer, and simultaneously his pay was raised, in keeping with his new dignity, from £4 17s. to £5 10s. a week.2 Later in the year it was announced that the charwomen working in the government offices in London had been organized into a union bearing the sonorous title of the Government Minor and Manipulative Grades Association of Office Cleaners,3 and that the Glasgow dustmen (American: garbage-men) would be known thereafter as the cleansing personnel.4 Meanwhile, the rat-catching department of the Ministry of Food had become the directorate of infestation control. The English butchers, fishmongers and fish-and-chips-shop keepers have long panted for more romantic designations. Many of the butchers already call themselves purveyors, usually in the form of purveyors of quality,5 and those of Birmingham use meat-traders, and have set up a Birmingham Meat-Traders’ Diploma Society which issues diplomas to its members, and calls its meat cutters meat-salesmen,6 just as American milk-wagon drivers are called milk-salesmen and bakers’ deliverymen bread-salesmen.7 The fishmongers still vacillate between fish specialist and sea-food caterer, the latter borrowed from America,8 but they have a committee at work that will no doubt solve the problem soon or late, and so get rid of what they describe as “an undignified and unpopular” name. Meanwhile, the English used car dealers and other such idealists are also showing signs of unrest, and P. E. Cleator sends me a sworn statement, attested by the finger-prints of the vicar of his parish, that he encountered a car-clinic at Wrexham, in North Wales, so long ago as 1937. Finally, from Punch comes news that a Cheshire cobbler, disdaining both shoe-rebuilder and shoetrician, calls himself a practipedist.1
293. [The English euphemism-of-all-work used to be lady,… and even today the English newspapers frequently refer to lady-secretaries, lady-doctors, lady-inspectors, lady-golfers and lady-champions.] This was written in 1936, and during the years that have passed lady seems to have gone into something of a decline. But the vocative form hooked to Lord and Sir naturally survives, and there is no sign of an abandonment of lady-mayoress. On May 7, 1937 the New York Herald Tribune printed a London dispatch saying that “the retiring-rooms specially erected at Westminster Abbey for Coronation Day will be severally marked as follows: Peers, Gentlemen, Men, and Peeresses, Ladies, Women,” but this seems to have been a rather unusual reversion to ancient forms. A correspondent informs me that in the signs on the public lavatories of London ladies and women appear to be varied without rule. “Usage,” he says, “does not follow a social distinction: very shady neighborhoods put up Ladies; very swanky ones Women.” A review of the decay of lady in the United States was published by Robert Withington in 1937.2 The DAE traces saleslady to 1870 and forelady to 1889, and marks both Americanisms. They are now virtually obsolete, but now and then a new congener appears, e.g., flag-lady, which began to be used by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1944 to designate female watchers at grade-crossings.3 But the women at work in the shipyards and other war plants were seldom if ever called ladies, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, when it put female trainmen to work in 1943, marked their caps, not train-lady or even train-woman, but simply trainman. The English still cling to the suffix -ess, and use it much oftener than Americans. Such of these common forms as mayoress or managress4 would strike most Americans as very odd, and so would conductress (of a street-car).1 But the older forms in -ess are still alive in the United States, e.g., deaconess, patroness, actress, poetess and songstress, and now and then a novelty appears, as when a contributor to the Chicago Tribune, in 1943, described Mrs. Roosevelt as “our commandress-in-chief.”2 During the era of elegance straddling the Civil War the termination was considered to be rather swagger, and some grotesque examples came into use. In a survey published in 1930 Mamie Meredith assembled doctress, lecturess, nabobess, rebeless, traderess, astronomess, editress and mulatress: the comic writers of the time contributed championess, Mormoness and prestidigitateuress.3 In 1865 Godey’s Lady’s Book printed a resounding plea for -ess,4 based upon the authority of the learned Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench of Dublin, who had discovered some affecting specimens in the Wycliffe Bible.5 Said the fair authoress:
It is not an innovation, inventing a new way of writing or speech, when we desire to see these terminations revived whenever the two sexes are, to any considerable extent, employed in the same pursuit. For instance, in teaching; as our system of public schools now recognizes young women as its most efficient agents, while yet men are employed, both sexes often in the same school. If the title teacher were confined to men and teacheress to the women (as the titles actor and actress are to the sexes) the language would be rendered more direct and definite, and this adds dignity to speech. We have sought out and
arranged a catalogue of words ending in ess now in use in our dictionaries as feminine terminations. We have introduced a few never before used, because the professions, or offices, were never, till within this century, held or exercised by women. For instance, professoress; no lady in England or America has held this important office. But in Vassar College6 ladies are eligible to this dignity. We hope they will not usurp the man’s title; but, following the analogies of our language, assume their own womanly style — professoress.
Titles of Professions1
Actor Actress
adulterer adulteress2
Arbiter Arbitress
Author Authoress
Doctor Doctress
Hunter Huntress
instructor Instructress
Janitor Janitress
monitor Monitress
Painter paintress*
postmaster Postmistress
Porter Portress
preceptor Preceptress
professor professoress*
Scholar Scholaress
Sculptor sculptress*
Songster Songstress
Shepherd Shepherdess
Sorcerer Sorceress
Steward Stewardess
Tailor Tailoress
Teacher Teacheress
Traitor Traitress
Tutor Governess
Waiter Waitress
Titles of Office, Rank, Respect
Abbot Abbess
ambassador Ambassadress
American Americaness*
Ancestor Ancestress
Baron Baroness
benefactor Benefactress
Briton Britoness
Canon Canoness
Chieftain Chieftainess
Deacon Deaconess
Director Directress