CUSTOMER
“Nowadays British Rail call me ‘You the Customer’ but I prefer my old-fashioned appellant, ‘Passenger’. Don’t you think ‘I glanced at my fellow passengers’ has a more romantic and promising air to it than ‘I glanced at the other customers on the train’? Customers buy cheese, loofahs and condoms. Passengers may have all these things in their luggage but it is not . . . their purchases that makes them interesting. A fellow passenger might be an adventure.”
Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells? No: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. Of Latin root, customer is 15th-century, previously a customs-house officer or somebody who acquires possession of property by long occupation of it (oft-marooned railway passengers could deem this the reason for “customer”).
CAH