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Obsequial Engineer. Businessmen have hastened to take advantage of the general, linguistic license. Deeply characteristic of American life, says Mencken, is the desire of the little man to make himself sound bigger, of the common man to make himself uncommon. (Even in the 18th Century, small New England shopkeepers had ditched the British shop in favor of the more grandiose store.) U.S. undertakers have fought and won a hundred-years' war to sweeten the sound of their macabre occupation. Today, after relatives have consulted with an obsequial engineer, the so-called patient (who may in his lifetime have been a realtor, soda-counter fizzician or canine-control officer) is first preserved by an expert sanitarian, then garbed in a slumber-robe, then laid in his slumber-cot, and finally whisked off in a casket-coach to his appointed burial-abbey.
Men of other occupations have refused to be outdone by the morticians. America's dignified Society of Automotive Engineers has noted the use of their sacred title by such prideful up-and-comers as the "rat, cockroach and bedbug eradicators," whose organization is known impressively as the American Society of Exterminating Engineers. Other engineers now include: sleep-engineer (bedding manufacturer), imagineer (idea-man), custodian-engineer (one who furnishes creative janitorial service), esthetic-engineer (an artist), pediatric-engineer (a corn-cutter), civilization-engineer (a scientist), odor-engineer (perfume manufacturer), and social-engineer (one who "appreciates that one important function of education is the release of the potential energies in human nature").
World War II has brought a spate of innovations, ranging from the G.I.-adopted Shangri-La (designating a comfort-station in the South Seas) to the experienced tires hopefully advertised by second-hand automobile dealers. Only in the field of creative swearing, concludes Author Mencken, has American verbal fecundity sunk as low as Britain's.