Years ago, I saw a news item about a homeless man who had found a way of getting some cheap food.
He would look up the list of funerals in his locality and attend. Most funeral services had a wake later, so this homeless man would attend and get his fill for the day.
This went on for some time until the funeral directors started to become suspicious.
I don’t think he was breaking any law, but he became regarded as an unwanted person.
He’s probably dead by now. I don’t know if anybody attended his funeral.
I thought about him recently while I was reading the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t recommend this for light reading — it has about 22,000 pages of small type.
The word that I found interesting was wailer.
Okay, I know wailer starts with a w and it’s obviously near the end of the dictionary. So I skipped a few pages when reading the dictionary, but I’ll go back to them later.
Let’s just say it was a quiet night on television and I’d already read Hopalong Cassidy.
The word wailer has a small entry on page 813 of the 19th volume. It is said to represent “a professional mourner” — a person paid to lament appropriately during a funeral. A waileress is described as “a female wailer”. Obviously, that word became popular before the women’s liberation movement frowned on various words ending with “ess”.
Wailer can be traced back as far as 1647, but waileress goes back even farther, having appeared in John Wyclif’s Bible (you can call him Wycliffe or something else if it makes you feel better).
An 1851 comment from GW Curtis in his Nile Notes mentioned “the shrill melancholy cry of the wailers” during a funeral procession.
Professional mourners had several other names in days of old, according to author Ammon Shea whose book called Reading the OED indicates his choice of television programs was even more restricted than mine.
Shea discovered some other words for professional mourners or the representation of mourners.
One was a weeper. Weepers were said to be “little images in niches on a funeral monument, representing mourners”. I think a weeper in this case was a stone image.
What about a moirologist? This was a hired mourner in Greece.
A keener was a professional mourner at Irish funerals, who “wailed or lamented bitterly” in lamentation for the dead.
Another word is “mute”. One meaning is “a professional attendant at a funeral; a hired mourner”. The earliest use of this that I could find was in 1762, but as late as 1962 PG Wodehouse in his novel Service with a Smile wrote about a woman sinking about the place “like a funeral mute”.
A word not in the English dictionary, but from Brazil, is, from what I’ve been told, carpideiras, meaning women hired to mourn at funerals.
Towards the start of the big dictionary, the word black occupies eight pages. On page 243 of the second volume the word black, marked obsolete, is defined as “a hired mourner at a funeral”.
I still haven’t ascertained why people would be hired to act as professional mourners at funerals. But in years past some people would weep for the sins they had created in the hope that they would go to heaven. In case their sincerity was in doubt, they arranged in advance, or their relatives arranged for them, to have others weep on their behalf. Probably the more noise, the better.
It can be a sad, sad world at times.
lbword@midcoast.com.au
