Alas … after going over a year without catching an example of the egregious misuse of the word, Will Self in an opeddish thing in BBC Magazine (of all places):
For what I think we require, as a society, is some sort of collective vomitorium. Not, you appreciate, that I expect you – like those mythical Roman patricians – to void the contents of your stomachs then limp groaning back to the dinner table.
… oh, and by the way, the Roman patricians weren’t mythical either.
- via: A Point of View: The British vomitorium (BBC Magazine)
I wonder if “mythical Roman patricians” wasn’t meant to imply that the whole scenario was mythical? At any rate, when I first saw it, the piece had a “The myth of the Roman vomitorium” inset, explaining what the word actual means (at Macrobius, Saturnalia 6.4.3), which tends to support that view.
maybe … not sure if that box was there when i first saw it, actually …
That’s the sense I understood too, that the idea of having a room for vomiting was mythical.