Correspondents to The Times have recently revived the use of the term emoluments to describe the pay & bonuses of bankers & leaders of FTSE 100 companies.
This practice is definitely one to be encouraged. Indeed the fat cats should be barred from using any other term, in public at least.
The OED suggests that, rather than deriving from the Latin ‘to bring out by effort’, the word really comes from the Latin emolere ‘to grind out’, with a sutble hint that it may the faces of the poor which are being ground.
There is also a hint of the emollient about it, with its hint of oiliness: ‘True emollients are perfectly bland, fatty substances’, according to Horatio Curtis Wood’s Treatise on Therapeutics, comprising Materia Medica and Toxicology, with especial reference to the application of the physiological action of drugs to clinical medicine of 1879.
The BBC should insist that all news bulletins use this term; even the best-trained most neutral news-reader could hardly prevent at least a slight sneer from entering their voice. I might even look forward to a John Humphrys interview if he was going to ask a banker to justify his emoluments.
