Weeks 19-20: Get-a-Job & Other Misnomers

In which the podcaster plays Telephone Games with prehistory, breaks down the industry of Western tradition, and leaves you with a pile of bacon. Mhe!

He also humbly begs your forgiveness for his zombie-like pronunciation of dead languages.

THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2. 

Transcript

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MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 15 – WEEKS 17-18: Get-a-Job and Other Misnomers

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 16, covering Weeks 19 and 20 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks biting those bullets and not watching, and avoiding thinking of watching, and even though I still find my thumbs occasionally scrolling down something, I give myself a quick and stern chastisement [1 JCS LASH] – okay maybe not a lashing but at least a finger-flick on my bad thumb, which seems to be working pretty well. I think my goal is to staunch the urge to watch completely if possible (it should be), ride it out a while, then see if I can watch safely and in moderation. (I did have to look up that last word.)

In the meantime I’ve been refocusing on lots of tasks. Do, do, do, that’s my motto. This week I performed three good deeds for people in assisted living situations – driving a friend’s mom to the doctor, taking my aunt to lunch in Petaluma, and helping to move hundreds of paintings by a prolific artist-friend safely into storage. (I’m trying very hard to view that theme as a happenstance of my age and NOT an augury of imminent assistance needed living.) I provided some paid literary services – leading a writing workshop and helping someone with a screenplay. And as planned (with some unplanned resistance), I’ve been more concertedly looking for a “real” “job”, both by prospecting for naming work, which I can’t believe has dried up completely, and sending my fart-free new resume out to prospective employers. The question is whether anyone will hire a 60-something male-assigned-at-birth regardless of a deep skill set. No luck so far, but I think I’m less in need of luck than in performing a good old prosperity dance. Still, as I mentioned in an earlier episode, one of my weaker skills in that set has always been what is known as “finding a job”. It almost seems like some kind of arcane or cabbalistic Catch-22ish knowledge that you have to already know in order to know, like one of those Ivy League cult thingies. I do know that I need in some way or another to “get a job”, but I’ve come to wonder whether I even understand what that means. So, like any good word-nerd, I decided that I’d better look it up. Here’s what I found.

Let’s start with get, which has a lot of meanings in American English, commonly versions of acquire, understand, cause to be, begin. I’m sure you can think of more and it’s easy to look up. All of the etymologies seem to trace it through Middle and Old English getan to Old Norse geta. (Integrity Warning: All the pronunciations here are approximate, of course, and a few are ludicrous or execrable, and I invite any speakers of Indo-European, Old High German, Gothic, and others to call in and correct me. Note that the spellings are in the transcript, which might be helpful to view this time.) So, Old Norse geta, meaning to obtain, beget, learn, guess. Same in Old Saxon and related to Old High German pigezzan (to uphold) and Gothic bigiton (to find, discover). It has a shared root with Latin praeda (booty, hunted prey) and Greek khandanein (to hold, contain, be able). Those connections are a little hard to see so we’ll have to trust the source (mostly in this case The Online Etymology Dictionary). All those from a Proto-Indo-European root: ghed (to seize). This is an ollllllld word, old sound connoting a deep primitive urge: Ghe! Ghe! Ghe! That’s some early human drive for ownership right there. Ghe! Get.

Next we have a, which should be an easy one because it does, and always has, essentially meant one. I love how some words play the Telephone Game all the way from prehistory and somehow stay about the same. It’s most recently from Middle and Old English ān (one) and goes back to Indo-European oi-no-, meaning one, unique, and from which we get many other words as well, including once, atone, union, universe, and any. This word notably expanded at some point from a numeral to an indefinite article by simply losing some stress in its pronunciation – by becoming more grunted. Uh! Uh! Ghe uh!

Now to job, which is somewhat more complex and not quite so primitive. Most etymologies say “origin unknown” (then some proceed to posit one anyway). Two linguists who write the Grammarphobia blog, Patricia O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman, note that designation often means that the evidence is either incomplete or disagreed upon, though evidence there is. So: job. The OED notes two possible etymological lines, both in 16th Century usage. The first meant not a profession (as we think of it today) but a single task within that profession – a “piece of work” as it were, or back in 1550, starting with the letter “i” in place of “j”, which came later, iobbes of woorke (er, jobs of work). Those Oxford people also note job as having meant a “cartload” or “the amount a cart and horse can bring at one time” – an amount rather than an action. So that phrase above kind of says, gobs of work. One source speculates a connection with the Old Frankish word gobe, a mouthful, akin to gobbet, a lump of food (think “gobble”). That seems backed up by Wiktionary, which connects job with Middle English gobbe (a mass, a lump), jobben (to thrust, to peck), and choppe (a piece, a bargain). Which is a lot of not-quite-connected, to my mind.

So what do we end up with? Ghe uh gobbe! Seize a gob of something! Get a job.

I don’t mind a good gob in my mouth every so often, but other wisdom suggests that I should, instead, “make a living” – kind of a weird thing to say if you think about it. So let’s see if that really is wiser or nicht. Make is another ancient sound that somehow made it through from prehistory to our panopticon world, in our frame through Old English macian, related to German machen (not related to mock but I sometimes wish it were). Most words related to make really do mean to create or a creation, and the Indo-European root mag- means fitting as in suitable, what one needs. So this is really a Germanic version of get. Mhe! Mhe! Mhe!  No big surprise there.

But living, there’s an interesting twist in this construction. Sure, it means a livelihood here, a means of maintaining one’s life – but that’s a tautology at best, a circular def that sayeth nada. So the real question is, What is the meaning of life – the word, silly, not the quite delightful Monty Python movie. Well from live we get Middle English liven and Old English libban and lifian. But life itself comes from..itself (head spinning yet?), meaning it is līf (spelled l-i-f) in Old English, Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, with close variations in Old High German and Dutch. That’s a lot of līf! And all with the same predictable meaning – buncha organic muck. BUT the Indo-European root, there’s the tickler. That formation is leip- [pronounced /lipe/], meaning at root to stick, to adhere – so life is essentially a sticking around. Additionally leip- means fat – yes that kind, which comes through in liposuction. We’re sticking around for the fat! Which is both humorous and accurate, since leip- suggests further primitive drives of survival and thriving. So “making a living” (mach liven, mach liven!) comes right back to Mhe! Mhe! Mhe! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! ......

Which leads us to – as much as anything leads to anything here – the curious construction and construct known as a living wage. Odd, odd, odd, this one. I’m not sure what form of “living” the neologists of that term were thinking of, but the word wage proffers one doozy of a wordpile. As a noun, wage as we know it commonly refers to payment or recompense, often per hour or a specified period and often applied to “unskilled” laborers (because working in an Amazon Fulfillment Center doesn’t require skills? c’mon!) or those relegated to a lower position in the artificial but ruthlessly enforced hierarchy of human industry. As a verb, though, wage means to engage, often used when speaking of war. Then of course we have the wages of war, which the soldiers who’ve been deemed only skilled enough to participate in battle actually pay, and pay, and pay. In older forms the word meant to pledge (now an obsolete usage), and with wagier in Old French and weddian in Old English, which also meant to wed. (We can see both pledging and engagement at work there.) And most curiously the Middle English variant, meaning pledge and security, came from the Old French guage (the English version being g-a-g-e and not the measuring tool), which referred to a valued object deposited as guarantee or security for a pledge, engagement, or wager (ahem), AND that glove of yore and lore thrown down in a challenge to fight was called a gage. (I guess that really did happen.) My gage, sir.

So what do I glean from all this mishmash to delineate the meaning of living wage? At first consideration the best I can parse out is this. A living wage might very well be

• a thrown glove that sticks to your face
• getting paid with something alive
• getting paid with something sticky
• receiving recompense for taking a life (or a chunk of it) [“I want the leg, Daddy!”]
• an arranged marriage, or
• a propensity for marrying a living person rather than a dead one.

Moving on because we must and likely should, let’s consider the traditional advice and counsel, oft heard, to “make it in the world”. This is one of my faves, and at least we’re back to making something, even if what that might be is a bit…obfuscated. I mean, what are we supposed to make? What is this mysterious it in the world? Yeah I know that make it is an idiom meaning, essentially, to achieve or complete something. Made it! But even that doesn’t make sense: To be finished in the world? Finished with what? We all know that can’t be acquiring enough wealth, because that just doesn’t happen; it’s a human impossibility. So what is it? Thanks for asking. From Old English hit and Proto-Germanic khi-, it goes back to the Indo-European root ko, referring to this, here (as compared to “that, there”, i.e. what is right in front of us. So I guess that solves it, haha. (At least we’re not doing thing, which is even loopier and used to mean a civic counsel or assembly. Go figure – and look it up if you’re curious.)

Then we have world, which is also kinda we-ird (though unrelated). It’s a Germanic word which is essentially identical in Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Norse: werald. But here’s the thing: that word is a combined form that is unique to Germanic languages; it and its meaning don’t exist in the Latinate and other trees. And that form is: wer, meaning man (still present in werewolf) plus ald meaning age, life, literally combining to mean age of man. Werald. So it appears that humanism started a little earlier than I thought. Weorold in Old English was used with connotations of human existence, the affairs of life, the human race, mankind, and humanity. Going further back we note that ald comes from the Indo-European root al-, meaning to grow, to nourish, whereas wer in IE is wi-ro-, from which we also get the related vir in Latin, meaning not mankind but men’s kind, male-kind, c.f. virile. Here we find the patriarchy edging, elbowing, clubbing its way into the center of our meaning, because It’s a men’s world! Fuck yeah! Ghe! Ghe! Mhe! Mhe! Uh! So I think I’ll choose to read making it in the world to mean finishing up with patriarchal culture. That sounds about right.

Speaking of finishing up, let’s conclude this pandemonium of iobbe geten with one more gem: “Bringing home the bacon”. Bring is another of those forceful action words (we love ‘em), to carry, convey, produce, present, etc, from Indo-European bher-, so bhae! bhae! Home is another fairly direct Telephone Game word, retaining meaning from the Bronze Age or earlier, more directly from Old English ham – don’t get waylaid by that bacon, this is ham as in hamlet (the village not the character, my god this is kaleidoscopic). Anyway ham (dwelling, house, abode, estate, village, region, country) has close variations in Old Frisian, Old Norse, Danish, Middle Dutch, German, and Gothic, all from IE (t)koimo- (settle, dwell, be at home).

(Tangent Warning! Home is by the way another instance of a fully Germanic root – a lot of those here – and is not related to Latin domus (house), even if it sounds a bit alike. I’m rather glad about that since the domus was known as the center of the patriarchal household in Rome, which included the family or (in Latin) familia, which itself has one of the more disturbing etymologies around. What’s that? you ask. I’m not sure you wanna know, but familia did not include the patriarch, rather indicated his wife and children who were in fact his property, along with his famuli (servants), all stemming from the word fama (fame), referring to the fame or notoriety brought to the patriarch by the people that he owned. Ick! And you think today’s families are challenging! I hate to think about what happened to those who brought him infamy. End of Tangent.)

We’ll wrap up this part of the discussion with bacon (mmmmm, turn on the oven, darlin!) – an easy word, actually, coming from Old French, Germanic, Old High German and others, describing quite simply the fatty meat of a pig’s back. Brae bachen! Uh! So bringing home the bacon turns out to be a little less insidious than some of the other phrases we’ve explored, at least if we ignore the fact that pigs are intelligent and so anatomically similar to humans that their organs are in the same places. Um. Plus I’m forever scarred by the bonus materials on the South Park Season 2 DVDs in which Trey Parker and Matt Stone intro each episode with a segment from a cooking show called Makin’ Bacon with Macon, in which they show different ways to cook delicious bacon, then feed it to a pig named Macon who munches it greedily. Mmmmm…yikes! But I still love the stuff, so I’m all for bringing it home whenever I can. And that’s what we’re talkin’ about here – how to get that frickin’ bacon!

Now that we’ve ascertained my goals a bit more closely, i.e. Ghe! Mhe! Bhae! Uh! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! Leip! (ahem), I mean that I do, somehow, for the sake of survival, clearly need to seize a sticky gob of back meat from a virile wedding. That’s a step forward, at least, though it doesn’t quite feel like a sashay into the chambers of cabal. So what do I need to do to even get a chance to peck at that cartload of gobbets? Further research indicates that there are several potential methods of infiltration, each with its own set of risks, the most promising of which are as follows. I can choose to:

• Jump through hoops, preferably whilst yelping woof! woof! woof! and Please, sir, may I be degraded;
• Get my foot in the door, which I gather will be similar to the experience I had as a kid of getting my foot actually stuck in the revolving door of a department store – ouch! – and expecting it to be sliced in two;
• Put my nose to the grindstone, which honestly sounds much worse;
• Get my ass in gear, but to be honest I’ve been to those basements and I’m kinda over them; or if all else fails or just seems less efficient, I could always
• Charm my way in, then kill and impersonate someone in order to take their job, or trust fund, or estate ala Mr. Ripley or Saltburn.

I think I like that last choice best. It somehow seems to have the most flair. I’m off and hunting!

Leip! Leip!   Leip! Leip! Leip!  Ghe!

You have been listening to Episode 16, covering weeks 19 and 20 of My 12-Month Video Fast. The next episode will drop like bacon from the sky on Saturday, November 2, by which time I hope to have geten an iobbe.

I do hope that you’ve found this exercise as instructive as I. Thank you for listening.     Ghe!  Ghe!  Ghe!   Ghe!    Ghe!    Ghe!      Ghe!       Bhae!    ………..