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A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
I wonder if ‘undertaker’ is a calque from Dutch, the other way around, or borrowed from a whole different language! In Dutch the word ‘ondernemer’ is still used in the broad sense of owning a business. As such, a common mistake for Dutch people to make in English, is to refer to themself as an undertaker, when they mean entrepreneur.
I was surprised you didn’t mention all the other instances in English where ‘undertake’ is still used in its older, broader sense, though specific in its own way. For example ‘undertaking’ to mean a big job or task. Or indeed the verb ‘to undertake’: to embark on a big job. And in reading a dictionary entry at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/undertake I realize it can even mean ‘to make a promise’ and ‘to take responsibility for something’, though I’ve not come across those organically, yet.