waiter

   This has been the professional title of the man who waits upon clients in a restaurant since the midseventeenth century. It replaced the earlier term ‘drawer’.

   Mr Narindar Saroop, writing to the Times (3 June 1988) about the difficulty of attracting a waiter’s attention, was of the opinion that ‘shouting “waiter” is no longer acceptable, if it ever was’. He went on to ask: ‘why don’t restaurants consider following the eminently sensible custom employed in two well-known clubs, where all the excellent staff are called Charles in one, and George in the other?’ In the follow-up correspondence no-one pointed out that such re-naming could be considered patronizing, or suggested that if names were to be used, the waiter’s real name might be more appropriate. Not that Charles Dickens would have thought so. In The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 30, he describes Mr Bob Sawyer as one who had about him that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description. In O.Henry’s short story The Little Rheinschloss there is a description of a large restaurant where the waiters wear numbers. The narrator of the story, perhaps reflecting normal usage at the time, addresses one of them throughout as ‘Eighteen’. One can imagine modern waiters objecting to that practice, but surely Mr Saroop missed the point? Waiters, like the rest of us, dislike being shouted at, but it is difficult to believe that they object to being addressed politely by their professional title.