Mind your language | 13 January 2007

Casket looks as if it will be an early victor in 2007 as a triumphant Americanism. In 2006 it was train station. A letter to the Daily Telegraph noted that even English Heritage had entitled a snowy scene of a Victorian railway station on its website as ‘Train Station’.

Even before the New Year, casket began to show its face. Reporting the death of the soul singer James Brown, the Sun said that he ‘remained a showman yesterday even in death — wearing a blue silk suit in a gold casket’. Then, in the Independent, it was over to Washington, where ‘a steady stream of mourners walked slowly past the casket of former president Gerald Ford in the Capitol’.

Both these examples came in American contexts. The Oxford English Dictionary, in instancing casket in the (US) sense of ‘coffin’, quotes a correspondent in New York in 1880 explaining, ‘In America a coffin is called a casket.’ The Times’s correspondent clearly got into the culture, or perhaps he was an American, for in reporting the funeral of President James Garfield in 1881 he wrote, ‘The casket will be placed on the train for Cleveland.’

Still, there seems no more need for it than for sidewalk, fender, hood, trunk, faucet, or, now, cell phone. Even more surprising was the widespread use of the word casket in reporting Saddam’s obsequies, for two reasons. ‘His corpse was encased in its simple casket in Baghdad just before midnight,’ wrote the Daily Mirror correspondent. First, Saddam’s funeral was not in an American context and, second, his humble Islamic coffin lacked any of the shiny, brassy, bulky characteristics of a grand American funeral casket. I guessed that the several newspapers that used casket for Saddam’s coffin picked the word up from a news agency.