Much to my annoyance, and yours, I know, language changes. Thus Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary we celebrate with its author’s 300th birthday this week, defined urinator as ‘a diver; one who searches under water’. Charles II had a urinator of his own, as a letter by Robert Boyle indicates: ‘His majesty’s urinator, Mr Curtis, published in the Gazette, how he had practised.’
That example of changed meaning is given by David Nokes in his new life of Johnson. He took it, with acknowledgments, from the agreeable Henry Hitchings, who wrote Dr Johnson’s Dictionary in 2005. Actually, urinator in that sense was already obsolescent in Johnson’s day. The Oxford English Dictionary helpfully notes that it was ‘in frequent use’ from about 1655 to 1685. It is merely a Latin word used in English. It could also, then as now, be used in the sense of ‘one who makes water’, which, if you think about it, one seldom does now.
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