23 Old and New Funeral Terms: Funeral Director Jargon from 1958

. . . The following list was published in 1958 in Excerpts from a Mortician's Workshop, by Samuel Henry Pierce, Sr., Dean of the Atlanta College of Mortuary Science and a pioneer in the professionalization of funeral home directors and staff.

Excerpts from a Mortician's Workshop

As a word lover, I could go into a long analysis of each term, or pontificate on targeted marketing, babble about the joy of euphemisms, or grouse about the theory of political correctness, or lay out some other psychological nonsense about this list. But I won't. Suffice to say that I am interested in all kinds of jargon — the technical terms of a specialty or industry — and, furthermore, having grown up in a household where Mom was the contact person for the Greater Detroit Memorial Society (*) for anyone with a death in the family, I absorbed quite a bit of this funeral business jargon without ever trying.

So, without further ado, the list:

Old Term . . . New Term

1. autopsy . . . post

2. body . . . remains, deceased

3. body call . . . first call

4. body car . . . service car

5. bury . . . inter

6. coffin . . . casket

7. corpse . . . remains, deceased

8. death call . . . first call

9. death certificate . . . vital statistics form

10. death notice . . . mortuary notice

11. died . . . expired

12. dig the grave . . . open the grave

13. flower truck . . . flower car

14. hearse . . . funeral coach

15. job . . . call

16. layout room . . . slumber room

17. makeup . . . cosmetics

18. morgue . . . preparation room

19. shipping box . . . outer case

20. show room . . . display room

21. shroud . . . garment

22. undertaker . . . mortician

[Mom would point out that this last word has long since been upgraded to the much nicer euphemism 23. funeral director.]

(*) The Greater Detroit Memorial Society was founded in 1960 to help consumers plan in advance for the death of a loved one, to educate the general public about the funeral industry, and to protect consumers from being taken advantage of in their time of bereavement; it is a nonprofit watchdog group, not a funeral business. Mom was a founding member and was the primary contact person for about 30 years.

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