A professional who prepares dead bodies for burial and helps arrange funerals and other funeral services.
From Latin mortuus meaning 'dead,' plus the suffix -ician (meaning 'a professional skilled in'). The word was coined in the early 1900s to create a more formal-sounding title than 'undertaker' for people in the funeral business.
Mortician is a brilliant example of using Latin to make a job sound more respectable—'undertaker' sounded too ordinary, so they created a fancy new word to elevate the profession's status. It's pure PR through etymology!
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