How Could Words Tell Us About the Constant Reshaping of Reality?
Can you imagine a world where jobs don’t exist? I’m thinking about it and I realise that a world like that is so far from the one I know now. Because today most humans’ lives are structured around work. We create five and ten year plans leading up to our career, schedule our daily lives, weekends and holidays around work, and then retire to live off what we earned from it. Would we even know what to do with our time if we weren’t working for a good portion of our life? These questions occurred to me because I was reflecting on some other questions — the ones we are most asked as children — ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, and then as adults — ‘what do you do for a living?’
Isn’t it interesting how, even though the question doesn’t mention it, the common understanding, even when we’re very young, is that the expected answer names a profession or career? Even if we have unusual, non-mainstream answers, we collectively assume that ‘being’, ‘doing’ and ‘living’ is equated to work and a specific role or identity you take on.
I think language has a lot to do with the worlds we human beings create and live in and it’s for this reason that language evolves with us. We construct ways to understand the world through what we know or are familiar with, and language follows our actions, morphing with our way of life. And my personal interest with words has been to question this relationship and to ask — could it be possible for words to take us to a new experience, to things we do not yet know or have names for? But I also recognise that language is our lineage. And I find that often following words back to some known roots, and seeing how and when their usage evolved can tell us something about ourselves.
The word ‘career’ comes from a French word ‘carriere’ meaning ‘racecourse’1. This evolved to mean a ‘general course of action or movement’ in the 1590s and that evolved to a ‘course of one’s public or professional life’ only in the 1800s. Which means that it was only about 200 years ago that we started using the word career in the sense we understand it today! And today one couldn’t imagine life without this meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines career now as ‘an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress’. It might seem like an odd evolution of the word at first, but ironically what happens on a racecourse is that you go round and round on the same track which is laid out for you. Where you start and where you end is predetermined (think — education, degrees, qualifications needed to start a career, and retirement at the end) and it’s just about who gets there first or fastest (or with the most profit!).
Similarly, when you look at the word ‘profession’, currently defined as ‘a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification’2, this meaning actually comes from the verb ‘to profess’3 (from ‘profiteri’) or publicly declare. And the noun usage we know today of ‘an occupation one professes to be skilled in’, apparently came about from the early 15th century.
According to the online Century Dictionary4 (Page 4755):
‘The word [profession] implies professed attainments in special knowledge, as distinguished from mere skill; a practical dealing with affairs, as distinguished from mere study or investigation; and an application of such knowledge to uses for others as a vocation, as distinguished from its pursuit for one’s own purposes. In professions strictly so called a preliminary examination as to qualifications is usually demanded by law or usage, and a license or other official authority founded thereon required.’
It seems to me like distinguishing ‘professed knowledge’ from ‘skill’ requires bodies and authorities that qualify or quantify that knowledge. As I was following these words and their origins on the internet, I found a website5 that listed the oldest professions in the world, which included hunter/butcher, builder, toolmaker, farmer, musician, tailor, artist, and storyteller. But, which authority could legitimise knowledge or skill 2 million years ago or even 20,000? I assume that for our ancestors, their action was their qualification and knowledge and skill were inseparable. Their ‘professions’ were based on necessities of living — food, shelter, security, interaction. Now in our market system, what is our necessity? Money?
So, as we spend time finding answers to what we want to be when we grow up, or what we (want to) do for a living, we stop thinking. We forget that we are the ones who made the meaning of the words we live with and continue to buy into them without question. We forget that even merely 600 years ago, the conceptual notions of what we commonly understand today didn’t exist. We take for granted that ‘that’s how things are’ without realising we had to agree for them to be that way. And we build all our other language around this tacit agreement. Everything refers to economy now — earnings, time, resources, relationships. The phrases ‘spending’ time and ‘buying’ into ideas or ‘paying’ for our actions slip by us in everyday speech. And if you look up the etymology of these words they have roots related to money and their usage in other contexts is only attested much later than their origin. Which means we can’t understand what these words mean in these phrases unless we understand how a market works. So, we create a new usage of the word by attaching it to a different activity.
Perhaps a world without jobs, careers or large scale life-defining market systems isn’t as far or unimaginable as one might think. And maybe the one we know is only too familiar to let go of. If we do get to imagine different worlds, different ways of living… Perhaps language is one way to do that — first by being responsible about which activities we choose to attach the meaning of words to, to know what we are agreeing to. And then by setting the word free from this attachment. I like to think we birthed language for sharing life, for giving life to what our words touched — not just for naming things to have a common reference point, but for searching for a meaning in the present time. Isn’t it amazing that we will never know when the first word was spoken because it lived only in its time? And although its ephemeral trace vanished as soon as it was spoken — and heard — its heritage lives in us, passed on from person to person. So we could use our language to share something that comes from a genuine lived relationship with the world around us that we actually want to share and pass on to the next one who will listen.
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References:
1. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=career
2. https://www.lexico.com/definition/profession
3. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=profession
4. http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/
5. https://www.oldest.org/people/professions/
