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.’
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