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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

Tag Archives: work

February 10, 2020 work-life balance

work-life balance

(1990’s | academese (psychology)? therapese? | “personal satisfaction OR fulfillment”)

An expression that settled quietly into the language over at least a decade or two, “work-life balance” was the distillation of years of hand-wringing over work-induced stress and its effect on employees and their home life. Articles about balancing work and life (or family) were showing up here and there in 1980, and by the end of the decade, the first instances of the exact phrase had been sighted. It’s worth a bit of time to map the variants: “work-family balance” also appeared in the eighties but was retired when single and childless employees felt left out. “Life-work balance” showed up a few times but was quickly extinguished, because work must always come first. Sometimes the gerund got into the act: “work-life balancing.” The virgule was used now and then and still is: “work/life balance.” It appears only a couple of times in LexisNexis before 1990 and was well in place by 2000. The expression seems to have arisen among psychologists in the seventies, judging from a few examples found in Google Books, but it didn’t start to show up in force until the nineties. By 2000 most of us had heard it.

Today’s mantra is “work-life integration,” meaning that you work at home and do personal stuff at work, or that you incorporate a certain amount of work into vacations or vice-versa. (A new adjective, “bleisure,” (business + leisure) has arisen to describe such travel. Blecch.) American workers have been doing that for decades; the new phrase seems a bit more forthright and therefore probably a net gain. “Work-life blend(ing),” “work-life harmony,” and “work-life stability” are others. Such expressions acknowledge that office work during off-hours is the not-so-new normal. At least now there seems to be a general understanding that it’s only fair to use a certain amount of work time for personal matters, which was not always considered kosher fifty years ago. Yet workers must remain vigilant, lest “work-life integration” turn into all work and no life.

“Balance,” in its most literal form, suggests half-and-half, as in someone on a tightrope, leaning to one side or the other but remaining upright. “Stability” has some of the same character, though it is even more likely to be heard figuratively; “blending,” “harmony,” and “integration” make no such pretension. If “work-life balance” fades in favor of these others, it will be yet another victory for the bosses over the bossed.

It’s striking how many expressions I’ve covered that have been put to use by executives against employees, promising concern and compassion while actually tightening the screws a little further with each buzzword. I call the roll (part of it, anyway) for the sake of posterity: “emotional intelligence,” “mindfulness,” “side hustle,” “team,” “wellness,” “who moved my cheese?.” Then there are some that don’t belong to the same family but are closely related: “downsize,” “go green,” “human capital,” “interpersonal skills,” “lean in,” “outsource,” “trickle down,” and “win-win.” Probably not invented by consultants, “work-life balance” nonetheless took an honored place in their vocabulary, offering itself to executives eager to look a bit more humane by encouraging employees to enjoy their free time and discouraging them from noticing how much the boss was horning in on it. Increased hours, demands, and pressure from the suites are then thrust back on the employee: your work-life balance is all wrong, but we’ll help you fix it. Whether the employer is sincere or not, it’s just one more way to blame employees for conditions they did not create.

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April 7, 2019 bad hair day, bedhead

bad hair day

(1990’s | “bad day,” “terrible day”)

A term that shot into prominence in the early 1990’s, though it had been around before that. How long before, I’m not prepared to say; one on-line source finds an example as early as 1970. No one has a convincing origin story for it; it just started bubbling up more often around 1990 and caught on. (1992 was the magic year, as far as I can tell.) As in the case of glass ceiling, the force of its rise and spread suggests pent-up demand. It’s something most of us undergo, at least occasionally, unless we’re fortunate enough to be bald. An inveterate cowlick sufferer in childhood, I know the feeling well. I can’t come up with a precise old-time equivalent, but the verb phrase “look a fright” meant something similar.

From the beginning, the bad hair day had a psychological component. You didn’t just have hair that wouldn’t behave, you were compromised mentally; your mood and concentration suffered because you couldn’t stop thinking about how your hair looked and imagining the reactions of everyone around you. It’s no secret that self-image affects self-esteem, but a full-blown bad hair day could be serious, causing one to become completely ineffective until the next day. And what happened if your hair refused to cooperate then? I don’t see any reason bad hair days couldn’t stretch to bad hair weeks and months, a long-term handicap, like a bad haircut, which is not the same thing but might be a precursor of some sort.

When you consider the disruptive force of the bad hair day, it’s not surprising the phrase took on the broader meaning of “day from hell.” A bad hair day often means a day where nothing goes right and you should have stayed in bed, but it still has to start with recalcitrant hair. Otherwise, it’s some other type of impossible day.

My sense is that “bad hair day” has receded somewhat and is not as popular or ubiquitous as it was when its flame burned brightly back in the nineties. But it’s part of the language, and its meaning hasn’t changed. The phrase has settled down as it has settled in, and now bad hair days may bring on the average more rue and less panic than they did back then. Yet the same threat of temporary psychological damage remains, and studies continue to show that bad hair days can have a debilitating effect, preventing us from doing our best work.

bedhead

(1990’s | “rumpled hair or look”)

Probably a Briticism; the earliest instances I found in LexisNexis came from Canada, and to this day it seems to be more common in the non-American press. In England, “bedhead” for centuries has referred to what we could call a headboard in the U.S. I’m not sure whether that makes it more or less likely that the newer meaning — tonsorial disarray upon rising — arose in the Isles. Originally, bedhead was unintentional and therefore unwanted, but now it can refer to a studied style, one more way for celebrities to arrange their hair. It may even look sexy if it’s done right, but in the early nineties, when the word appears first in LexisNexis, bedhead was a misfortune, more to be pitied than ventured.

Bedhead strikes even before you find out it’s going to be a bad hair day. But sometimes your hair may be tamed with ritual application of unguents and elixirs, or at least Brylcreem. Someone should do a study to determine how often bedhead leads directly to bad hair and a subpar day (that would be a “bed hair day”). A substantial percentage, we may surmise, but how substantial? Thirty? fifty? ninety? If it were at the lower end, we might take modest comfort in knowing that we’ll get a break sometimes and the universe is not invariably a hostile place. All I ask is that the universe remain neutral. When it starts stacking the deck, I get offended.

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December 3, 2017 laser-focused

laser-focused

(1990’s | journalese? athletese? | “single-minded,” “intent (on)”)

The output of a laser meets a casual definition of “focused”: a light beam formed from many waves, all of the same wavelength, projected through a very narrow opening. There are those who believe that the uniformity of the light waves means that it is incorrect to describe a laser as “focused,” because focusing happens only with light of many different wavelengths, but it’s also true that there are such things as focused lasers. Besides, it’s the uniformity that gives the impression of focus, optics notwithstanding. So it’s not surprising that we took to talk of “laser focus.” I can’t think of any precise noun equivalents from before 1980, except perhaps for “undivided attention,” but we had several closely related concepts, such as “bearing down,” “bound and determined,” “powers of concentration.” It suggests not only purpose but precision, not only concentrating effectively but concentrating on the right thing. “Laser focus” has also done spot duty as a verb for twenty years at least, though it is not used in the imperative, as “focus” by itself is.

The expression seems to have arisen in sportswriting, if you believe LexisNexis (in this case, I’m not sure I do); the first unmistakable instances popped up in articles about boxers in the late eighties (the laser industry trade magazine “Laser Focus” had been around for several years by then). As with “wonk,” Bill Clinton did not invent the expression but helped solidify it in the early nineties when he promised a “laser focus” on the economy. For all that, it does not seem to have become rife until after the turn of the millennium; I don’t recall hearing it until probably after 2010, though it might have crossed my path earlier.

The advent of the CD player, which was for most of us the first practical, everyday use of a laser, helped make this term possible. Lasers were exotic then (they’re still kind of exotic), but there one was in your own home, bringing your favorite tunes to life. There was a vague understanding in the air that a laser was the magical part of the new piece of equipment, much spookier and more advanced than a diamond stylus or magnetic tape. So lasers were ushered into the general consciousness, opening up room for a new figurative expression. A mere thirty years later, “laser-focused” was declared business jargon by Bloomberg News, and it is clearly a term businessmen have picked up, more than politicians, though it is available to anyone now.

We generally hear the term as praise, but calling someone “laser-focused” may just be a nice way of saying they are wearing blinders; that is, it may imply the wrong kind of workaholism or micromanagement. It’s one thing to pour your efforts into reaching a commendable goal, but obsession has its own risks even in the service of a noble cause. I would say the term generally continues to have a positive connotation, but it certainly can suggest something else: an unhealthy involvement in a single pursuit that leads to exclusion or isolation. We don’t hear that when a corporate spokesman boasts of a laser focus on customer service, but when an individual exercises laser focus, we may wonder.

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January 5, 2017 slam, slammed

slam

(1980’s | journalese (politics) | “lambaste,” “lash out at,” “rap”)

slammed

(2000’s | computerese? | “snowed under,” “overburdened”)

If you persist in associating slamming with doors, home runs, telephones, or fists on the table, you are behind the times. If you think of poetry or dancing, you’re in better shape, but the verb has taken on two intriguing and non-obvious definitions since 1980, both of which are technically transitive, but one of which is generally used in a way that disguises its transitivity, to the point that it may not be transitive at all any more — more like an adjective. To be fair, only doors and home runs got purely transitive treatment in the old days; telephones and fists required an adverb, usually “down,” although Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, sometimes wrote of a telephone receiver being “slammed up,” which may reflect an older usage or may have been idiosyncratic. Sometimes a preposition is required, usually “into,” as in slamming a car into an abutment. (But you might also say the car slammed into an abutment.) That’s if you neglected to slam on the brakes.

“Slam” today means “attack” or “harshly criticize,” while “slammed” means overwhelmed by work or life in general, when it isn’t merely serving as a past participle. The former emerged first, before 1990 — I found very few examples before 1980 — primarily in political contexts, though it could also be used to talk about entertainment, as in slamming an actor, or his performance. It appears to have been more common in England and Australia; I doubt it originated there but our anglophone cousins may have taken it up faster than we did. “Slammed” came along later; I found only a few examples before 2000, mainly among computer jockeys.

How are the two meanings related? They both rest on deliberate infliction of metaphorical violence, obvious when one politician slams another, less so when one feels slammed “at” or “with” (not “by”) work. When I first encountered that usage, I understood it to mean the boss had assigned a whole bunch of work without recognizing that the employee already had too much to do. That doesn’t seem particularly true any more. “Slammed” no longer automatically imputes malice — if it ever did — and need not suggest anything other than adverse but impersonal circumstances. Gradually it has spread so that it need not refer strictly to having too much to do; in recent years it has developed into a synonym for “exhausted.” It has somewhat more potential for expansion than “slam,” which has not strayed from the basic idea of heated verbal assault.

Is there a direct link between the two? We might expect to discern a path from the older meaning to the newer, but how would it work? The boss can excoriate your performance, or he can dump too many tasks on you, but they would seem to be separate operations. If you’re no good to begin with, why would the boss ask you to louse up still more projects? It’s a compliment if the boss piles work on you, not an insult. The linguistic pathways that led to these two recent additions to the dictionary may remain mysterious, but there should be no confusion about why they have become so popular in the last thirty years. Our pleasure in believing the worst of each other has led inescapably to uglier discourse, offering numerous opportunities to use the older verb. On the job front, whatever productivity increases we’ve wrung out of the workforce since 1970 have come from longer hours and fewer people; so those who still have a job must work harder. Conditions favored harsher language, and there was versatile “slam(med)” to fill the gap.

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August 25, 2016 decompress

decompress

(1980’s | athletese | “unwind,” “relax,” “take it easy”)

This word first came to our attention primarily as a result of the Iran hostage crisis, or rather its end in January 1981. The hostages flew first to a U.S. base in Germany and stayed there for several days. The State Department discouraged family members from visiting them, because they needed time to “decompress.” The word had appeared before with a similar meaning, but it showed up in all the major news outlets and was treated as a novelty. The word was also used on occasion to talk about Vietnam veterans returning too quickly to civilian life.

Much older in the contexts of medicine, engineering, and particularly diving, “decompression” is extremely important to deep-sea divers, who must avoid the bends by returning to the surface very gradually, resting at certain depths along the way so their bodies can get accustomed to lower pressure. This use seems to be the direct ancestor, and it is definitely echoed in both the cases of ex-hostages and ex-soldiers. Moving from a high-pressure environment to less intense surroundings requires time to adjust; the more time taken, the more likely the transition will be smooth. In engineering and medicine, “decompress” meant simply “relieve pressure,” obviously a related usage, though normally transitive. (Why didn’t Jimi Hendrix do a song called “Manic Decompression”?) In computerese, “compress” was in use by the mid-eighties to denote making computer files more compact, or combining them, without deleting data, and “decompress” was its usual antonym; it can still be used that way, though my ear says that “extract” has become the most common term for restoring the files to their original size and configuration.

Soldiers in Vietnam and the hostages in Iran both went through terrible ordeals, and “decompress” was often used in such contexts in the eighties. Now we are more likely to talk about a vacation from work or a little r&r rather than recovering from prolonged physical and emotional strain. One can find instances of “decompress” even in the seventies referring to respite from much less arduous circumstances. Even so, my own feeling is that the word still bears some weight. If you need to decompress, you’ve been under significant stress — “stress” itself has evolved into the verb “de-stress,” which is a competitor — and probably for some time. Or perhaps the average daily stress level (I propose a new statistic to the Labor Department: ADSL) has gone up in forty years to the point that a garden-variety vacation from the office seems tantamount to a break from captivity or jungle warfare. “Decompress” has been helped into prominence by its association with “stress,” not only by virtue of rhyme but by contiguity of sense as well.

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January 28, 2016 task (v.)

task (v.)

(1980’s | bureaucratese | “order,” “assign,” “give a job to”)

This verb never quite went away, as it turns out. “To task” is very old, and it persisted for centuries, turning up in Shakespeare and in both Johnson’s and Webster’s dictionaries. According to Google N-grams, there were more incidences of the verb (I used the word “tasked” as a search expression) in 1900 than in 1940; it did not appear as often between the 1930’s and the 1970’s as it did before or after. The lapse of a couple of generations was sufficient, however, to prompt several influential journalists to object to the verb’s revival in the eighties. The redoubtable Helen Thomas took Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s National Security Advisor, to task over his use of “the noun ‘task’ as a verb” (November 20, 1985); William Safire and George Will both deplored the same usage just a couple of years later, as the Iran-Contra hearings were giving the verb an airing. Its route into everyday language runs through government officials, especially those associated with the military or espionage. It has spread to all fields now, used easily in sports and entertainment writing and everywhere else. One wonders if “multitask” would have taken off as it did if the root verb hadn’t trickled into the mainstream in the eighties.

The meaning of the verb was not much different in 2000 than it was in 1900. In the olden days, there was a greater tendency to use “tasked” to mean “burdened”; use of the verb strongly implied that the duties prescribed were unwelcome or excessive. That may be true today, but the link is not as strong as it was back then. It’s basically the same word as “tax” — also both noun and verb — but it has long had the meaning of “prescribed work” as opposed to “prescribed levy.” You might see “overtask” used as a substitute for “overtax,” for example. It may be a metathesis analogous to the Middle English “aks” turning into the modern “ask.”

By 1990, certainly, there were several possible ways to use “task” as a verb. First, it can be transitive or intransitive, although it is usually transitive, which we can discern from the fact that it is often used in passive voice. If it was not followed by a direct object — the unfortunate person who had a job dropped on her plate — it was followed by a preposition, usually “with” or “by” (there’s that passive voice). Or it may be followed by an infinitive, as in a phrase like “tasked to make the donuts.” What would be the alternative? “Tasked with making the donuts.” Semantically, there’s not much difference, and I don’t believe we should attach too much importance to the grammatical distinction. My ear and LexisNexis agree that by now “task with” has won out over the other variants as the predominant verb phrase.

There is a small but plucky group of expressions whose members have been around for at least a century or two but have either never been used commonly or have undergone some kind of eclipse before flowering in our era. I call the roll for the benefit of future generations: “overthink” had disappeared long since, but now it’s ordinary. “Hurtful” spent five hundred years as a word that sounded wrong but has spent the last thirty proliferating. “Ramp up” has meant several different things, but it has never in its long life (it goes back to Middle English) gotten the workout it has gotten since 1990. “Template” is a technical term dating back to the eighteenth century whose use has spread and soared. “Life lesson” and “bloviate” date from the nineteenth century. The former was used infrequently by philosophers, poets, divines, and no one else until 1990 or so. “Bloviate” is similar to “task” (v.) because it fell into disuse during the mid-twentieth century. “On task” must bring up the rear; it has little linguistically to do with this week’s expression, despite sharing a headword.

Martha and Adam from Queens suggested “task force,” which turned out to date from the thirties and forties but did remind me that “task” as a verb (using it in the infinitive — “to task” — never sounds right somehow) had been on my list for a while. Another victory for the Queens contingent!

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May 14, 2015 guest worker

guest worker

(1980’s | bureaucratese? | “migrant worker,” “bracero”)

An import, “guest worker” is a literal translation of the German “Gastarbeiter.” Early occurrences in the New York Times confirm a German origin. Like the signifier, the signified is imported — an imported worker. In both English and German, the term is a euphemism devised to speak politely about a group of people no one really likes. Until 1980, it was used almost entirely in reporting on other parts of the world, mainly Europe, where waves of laborers from poorer countries (southern and especially southeastern Europe) moved to richer countries to fill temporary labor shortages. Early in his first term, Ronald Reagan proposed a limited guest worker program along similar lines: Mexican laborers could spend a few months here picking crops and then be shuttled home until next year. This sort of limited-time, manual and/or seasonal labor was what we thought of when we thought of guest workers for at least twenty years thereafter. Somewhere around 2000, it became possible to use the expression to talk about skilled laborers, meaning programmers and engineers, usually from Asia. Now both levels are available in everyday discussion, and there doesn’t seem to be much difference in frequency.

When presidents talk about sanctioning (now there’s a fine example of a word that can have two opposite meanings) guest workers, it’s usually one prong of an immigration strategy that also includes stricter border control and acceptance of workers who are already here illegally. In other words, we want to make it harder for people to sneak in from now on, but we know there’s not much we can do about the ones already here that isn’t incredibly expensive and incredibly intrusive. But then we need guest workers to replace the stream of illegal immigrants. Reagan and G.W. Bush both proposed a version of this plan, and so has Obama. Immigration goes right on fueling a long-simmering debate in the U.S., where second-generation immigrant groups are always ready to pull up the ladder once they get established, and there are always plenty of upstanding citizens ready to look askance at more recent ethnic arrivals. The right can appeal to national unity; the left to jobs and job security stolen from American workers (actually, right wingers often talk about jobs, too). As for the guest workers themselves — who are making their way to America the same way we’ve been doing it for 400 years, and for the same reason: it’s where the money is — they remain an easily exploited group of utterly expendable people, forever victims of injustice or worse, so destitute they must endure all sorts of privation and danger to give their families a slightly better chance of a slightly better life.

I alluded above to the class divide among guest workers, which can be roughly summed up by the difference between two U.S. workers’ visas, the H1-B (high-tech) and the H2-B (low-tech). It may be an overbroad generalization, but I find the class divide applies not only to the guest workers, but to those who use the term “guest worker.” When executives or members of Congress use the phrase today, they’re usually talking about highly educated workers, ostensibly needed to prevent the U.S. high-tech industry from collapsing in the face of foreign competition and an inadequate domestic educational system. When small-town or middle-class people use it, they’re talking about the harvesters and landscapers who take a toll on public services and depress wages for everyone, besides taking jobs away from folks who’ve lived around here all their lives. Of course, both usages are available to both sides of the divide, but doesn’t this sound like some new class-based vocabulary? Wait: You mean the same word can mean different things to the rich and the poor? When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a new idea at all.

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March 30, 2015 touchy-feely

touchy-feely

(1980’s | journalese? therapese? | “unscientific,” “soft-headed,” “frivolous”; also “hands-on”)

“Touchy-feely” is actually a little old for the blog, having arisen in the late sixties or early seventies to talk about Esalen and encounter groups. In its original sense, the term was quite literal; the phrase referred invariably to physical contact, often with the implication that there was something illicit about it. No doubt some of that stuff really was orgies disguised as treatment, but more legitimate forms of therapy also explored the benefits of contact — affectionate, violent, or otherwise. This meaning of “touchy-feely” was always most common but the expression had two other meanings since the seventies that remain available. One is “affectionate” — but “touchy-feely” is often used more specifically to describe someone who subjects students or employees to unwanted touching. The other, less common, is “hands-on,” as in a museum or lesson. So an exhibit where visitors are encouraged to touch the objects on display might be described as touchy-feely. This is not a common usage, but I found examples from the seventies and the teens, so it demonstrates a low-grade persistence. Occasionally, it can even mean “intuitive to use,” as in a smartphone feeling natural under one’s fingers. As far as I can tell, the phrase has nothing to do with “touchy,” meaning irritable or easily offended. Older expressions that may have exercised influence are “namby-pamby” and “lovey-dovey.” A newer one that is used in similar ways is “warm-fuzzy.” (Thanks, Liz!)

The reigning meaning of “touchy-feely” mutated, or grew, rather quickly. By 1980, it was already possible to use it much more loosely to talk about all kinds of human interaction, not just tactile. Anyone who tried to get a group to work, play, or learn together effectively by getting to know each other (or themselves) or talking about feelings rated the term. To this day, it is used to talk about the unquantifiable, the impressionistic, the emotional. Even when “touchy-feely” doesn’t mean touch, it always means feelings.

The expression is generally used with derision, which may be veiled or unconcealed. The state of being “touchy-feely” is the antipode of rigor and analysis, so it is unscientific and its benefits are therefore considered unprovable. But it is also opposed to machismo. Real men do not drag emotions into the conversation, or base their actions on them (which is just as well, because when they do, they tend to turn violent). It is also opposed to law and order; cops and prison guards reserve special venom for those who advocate anything other than forcible and remorseless crackdowns on criminals. The range of people who use the phrase with a sneer is wide: engineers, computer geeks, physicians, businessmen, law enforcement, political conservatives, real men from all walks of life. At its broadest, it becomes a synonym for vague, impractical, effeminate, soft, or weak. Even when it is used jocularly, an undertone of scorn is usually there. When tough-minded executives use the term, they do so to dismiss anything unrelated to the bottom line, and the phrase connotes employees paying too much attention to themselves and not enough to the welfare of the company. The work done, and even the employees themselves, have a dollars-and-cents value, and anything that suggests that they might have other kinds of value, to each other or to the organization, is brushed aside. In extreme cases, human warmth of any kind, even in the briefest manifestations, is considered detrimental to profits.

“Touchy-feely” has come to stand for a wide range of attitudes, beliefs, and ways of seeing the world. In that respect it resembles another sixties word, “holistic,” but it has fewer defenders. You don’t use this term when you’re talking about making the office more productive by creating a collegial and friendly atmosphere, except perhaps with a tone of rueful irony.

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March 13, 2013 workaholic

workaholic

(1980’s | therapese? journalese? | “drudge,” “drone”)

Was there an old word for this? See the best I can do above, and it’s not very close. You could say someone was tied to his desk, maybe even “deskbound,” but a noun? It seems to me that we missed an opportunity to talk about “stay-at-work dads” when we started to talk about “stay-at-home moms,” but I don’t think that expression was used much before 1980 anyway.

This word seems to have marshaled itself and marched into the language in the late seventies, although the OED and the 2008 edition of Partridge trace it back to 1968, and I’ll admit I found a few instances in Google Books from before 1975, but not many. It seems to have been the first word to adopt the “-aholic” suffix from “alcoholic”; there have been many others, but few with the same staying power. To my ear, only “shopaholic” and “chocoholic” have anything like the same frequency of use. (Here’s an example of a fellow blogger having some fun with the construction.) There could be a new one coming along any day now, of course — that’s part of the fun of watching language evolve. One linguist gave “-holic” as an example of “a pseudo-affix attached to bases” (Katamba, “English Words,” 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005). According to urbandictionary.com, it is permissible to use “holic” by itself, with listeners depending on context to determine which variety is intended.

The noteworthy thing about “holic,” whether suffix or word, is that it doesn’t mean anything, yet we grasp it immediately. When “workaholic” began to appear in the mainstream press around 1975, it was almost never glossed and only sometimes placed in quotation marks. You were just supposed to know what it meant, and I daresay most people did. James J. Kilpatrick decried the “holic” phenomenon as early as 1985, and Follett’s Modern American Usage is no more complimentary. (Follett blames journalists, not therapists, for the rise of “workaholic” and its cousins.) Those who care about English usage must cringe at least a little at these weird words, formed by breaking another word at an unintelligible point — there is really no excuse, etymological or otherwise, for treating “alcohol-ic” as if it were “alc-oholic.” Fowler’s is more forgiving, calling “aholic” a “useful and productive word element, whose progress in the language is to some extent a reflection of social preoccupations.” Nothing new under the sun.

Ever since its dawning, the word has had two related but distinct meanings: someone who is addicted to work, to the detriment of health, relationships, etc. vs. someone who just works all the time without noticeable ill effects. When they called Jimmy Carter a workaholic in 1976, it usually had a complimentary tinge, but around the same time it was also used to describe neglectful husbands and office nuisances who took on too many tasks and gummed up the works for everyone else. Sometimes a pathology, sometimes a source of pride. Rather like the “type A personality” — the concepts are closely related.

Usage note: “workaholic” is rarely applied to manual laborers. It goes with salesmen, politicians, administrators, office workers generally; I’ve seen it applied to baseball players, who work with their hands but don’t do manual labor. There are workaholics in the fields and coal mines, and one can use the word to refer to them, but it sounds a little funny somehow. That may be because farmers and miners don’t have a choice about whether to work hard or not; no appeal to an emotional disorder is needed to explain their diligence. Would those who consider workaholism a pathology consider it an ungovernable compulsion, analogous to heroin addiction? There is a Workaholics Anonymous. The word can be used fancifully, too, as in this encomium to the noble kidney, organ extraordinary, published on Huffington Post, “The kidney is a workaholic.”

Thanks to the inestimably and estimably lovely Liz from Queens for nominating this word!

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