We had some behind-the-scenes tasks to accomplish prior to a funeral at our church this week. While we were working someone mentioned the word/term undertaker. When I was growing up in Maysville, Oklahoma, the town had one funeral home, and the proprietor was always referred to as the undertaker. I guess I never thought much about it before, but undertaker is a strange word. He is obviously involved with certain “undertakings,” but so is everybody else. I’m not sure, but when I was a kid I probably thought he was called an undertaker because he put or took someone under the ground.
Undertaker is someone who undertakes a task. Obviously the undertaker we were referring to was someone who undertakes to embalm, beautify, lay out, arrange services for and bury or cremate the dead. Again, I’m not sure why the term came to be applied this one profession and not some other.
During my extensive research for this blog, I found a blurb from The American Language by Henry L. Mencken stating that during the Civil War, undertakers used to follow the armies like prostitutes, not to pleasure the soldiers but to embalm them. In newspaper ads they called themselves “doctors.”
It may be that acts like these gave the term undertaker a bad name and in 1895, the trade magazine The Embalmers’ Monthly put out a call for a new name for the profession to distance itself from the title undertaker — that term being tarnished over the years for a number of reasons. They initially settled on the term mortician that is derived from the latin word mort- (“death”) + ician.
Today, mortician seems to have become tarnished and pretty much been replaced by funeral director. If you can find a phone book anymore, look in the Yellow Pages and you won’t find any listings under either undertaker or mortician. Everything related to practitioners of this profession is listed under Funeral Directors. Under that heading, some establishments call themselves mortuaries, some are called funeral homes, some memorial parks.
My extensive research uncovered a funeral home called Aftercare. Although I don’t know how they came up with that name, I think it’s kind of interesting. Maybe before too long, Aftercare will replace mortuary, columbarium, funeral parlor and memorial park. And — it’ll be near the front of the Yellow pages, if there’s any of those left…
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