porter

   While this word immediately suggests a luggage porter at an airport or railway station, it can also be used as a vocative to a porter of a different kind, the doorkeeper or janitor of an institution such as a college or school.

   Porter in the ‘carrying’ sense has to do with Latin portare, ‘to carry’. In the doorkeeper sense it derives from Latin porta, ‘door’.

   The porters who appear in the Shakespeare plays are mostly doorkeepers and are addressed as ‘good porter’, ‘good master porter’. Gloucester, in King Lear, when accused of conducting the king to Dover, tells Regan: ‘Thou shouldst have said “Good porter, turn the key.”’ The title of ‘porter’ for a school or college official lives on in Britain.

   In Dandelion Days, by Henry Williamson, ‘the little liveried porter of Colham Grammar School’, known as Soapy Sam behind his back, is addressed as ‘porter’ by both staff and boys. In many British universities, however, the head porter would always be addressed as ‘Mr’ + last name. The Times newspaper stressed that point when it reported in 1988 on the retirement of Mr George Hales as head porter of Trinity College Cambridge. Mr Hales became nationally known when he ordered Prince Charles, then a student at the college, to get off his bike. At one time Marie Lloyd regularly sang a song she made well-known: ‘Oh, Mr Porter, what shall I do? Railway porters continued to be addressed as ‘porter’, however, rather than by this mock name.