| 词源 |
undertaker. Undertaker has been used since at least 1698 for what is in the U.S. euphemistically called a mortician. Perhaps the term originated as a joke (for an undertaker does take someone under the ground), but there is no proof of this. Un- dertaker is recorded three centuries earlier in the sense of “one who undertakes a task or enterprise,” and an undertaker meant “a publisher,” and, to be fair, “an author,” before it came to mean one who arranged funerals. |