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The Wage Slave's Glossary
AS FEATURED IN THE OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTEST LIBRARY
Everybody knows a brown-noser when they see one. But how about a freeter? A workbrickle? A jack? Can they tell downsizing from greybearding or brightsizing?
With The Idler’s Glossary (2008), Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn offered a spirited defense of leisure. As confirmed idlers themselves, they assured us their Glossary could provide “everything you need to know about how to conduct a life.” Today, however, as we recover from the worst global recession since 1929, the work-world is a very different place. In order to understand it better, our anti-capitalist etymologists are therefore putting down their cigars, picking up their shovels, and drudging out English from the ditch of corporate jargon. For anyone who’s ever had to moil for high muckety-mucks, The Wage Slave’s Glossary is essential reading—as the moral wit of Kingwell & Glenn is indispensable to the present age.
Everybody knows a brown-noser when they see one. But how about a freeter? A workbrickle? A jack? Can they tell downsizing from greybearding or brightsizing?
With The Idler’s Glossary (2008), Mark Kingwell and Joshua Glenn offered a spirited defense of leisure. As confirmed idlers themselves, they assured us their Glossary could provide “everything you need to know about how to conduct a life.” Today, however, as we recover from the worst global recession since 1929, the work-world is a very different place. In order to understand it better, our anti-capitalist etymologists are therefore putting down their cigars, picking up their shovels, and drudging out English from the ditch of corporate jargon. For anyone who’s ever had to moil for high muckety-mucks, The Wage Slave’s Glossary is essential reading—as the moral wit of Kingwell & Glenn is indispensable to the present age.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
136 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2011
88 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 12, 2020
Like the more recent Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, here Glenn and Kingwell focus on the proliferation of language surrounding work and its discontents. Unlike Leary's Keywords, Glenn and Kingwell dive less into scholarship and history but instead focus on the dark humour of their subject. They attempt to write from "below" by taking the position of the "idler" or the "wage slave", but can't quite escape the vaguely corny feeling of playing without risks - for Kingwell, a professor, the precarity feels unreal; for the other, Glenn, the shared position of identifying as white and masculine close off the riskiness endemic in the term wage slave that cuts too close to home to be in any way humorous. Still, there's plenty of joy to be found among the definitions here, with cutting remarks aplenty.
August 6, 2023
The Introduction is an essay with a fun mix of academic philosophy and comedy. The art and design are fun.
“Work meetings are entirely self-generating, like consciousness.”
“The workaholic colonized his own despair at the perceived emptiness of life - it’s non-productivity - by filling it with work.”
“Language allows us to distinguish between appearance and reality, but it also allows some of us to persuade others that appearances are realities. Deception can only work if there is such a thing as truth.”
“Commercially lucrative, gangsta rap, whose celebration of crime, drugs, violence, and misogyny might be explained away as a confrontational, act of artistic ventriloquism, but whose glorification of materialistic ambition cannot be forgiven.”
What I learned: I should call off work more often.
Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need.
Career used to mean a race track. And even if you win the rat race you are still a rat.
If corporations are people, they are psychopaths.
I’d rather have ham where I am then pie in the sky. This expression was coined in a Wobblies song.
“Work meetings are entirely self-generating, like consciousness.”
“The workaholic colonized his own despair at the perceived emptiness of life - it’s non-productivity - by filling it with work.”
“Language allows us to distinguish between appearance and reality, but it also allows some of us to persuade others that appearances are realities. Deception can only work if there is such a thing as truth.”
“Commercially lucrative, gangsta rap, whose celebration of crime, drugs, violence, and misogyny might be explained away as a confrontational, act of artistic ventriloquism, but whose glorification of materialistic ambition cannot be forgiven.”
What I learned: I should call off work more often.
Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need.
Career used to mean a race track. And even if you win the rat race you are still a rat.
If corporations are people, they are psychopaths.
I’d rather have ham where I am then pie in the sky. This expression was coined in a Wobblies song.
June 14, 2014
Somewhat entertaining read.
Winning mental image: Seagull manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits everywhere and then leaves.
Empire-building: Making yourself un-fireable by hoarding credit and/or prestige, and gaining control over key projects and initiatives.
And this choice Bertrand Russell quote (In praise of Idleness): Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid, the second is pleasant and highly paid.
The second kind is capable of infinite extension. One can give advice on what kind of orders to be given (consultants, bureaucracy), and if two opposite kinds of advice are given, it is known as politics.
Winning mental image: Seagull manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits everywhere and then leaves.
Empire-building: Making yourself un-fireable by hoarding credit and/or prestige, and gaining control over key projects and initiatives.
And this choice Bertrand Russell quote (In praise of Idleness): Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid, the second is pleasant and highly paid.
The second kind is capable of infinite extension. One can give advice on what kind of orders to be given (consultants, bureaucracy), and if two opposite kinds of advice are given, it is known as politics.
December 6, 2011
What an entertaining book! I anticipated a comical dictionary of work jargon, but this well-researched little volume is quite informative. Somehow I had forgotten that "layoff" once meant something that was temporary, for example.
Don't get me wrong - the humor is still there, as when detailing (no pun intended) the basic difference between "crop Dusting" and "laying an egg".
The real message may lie in the introduction, and this quote from Bertrand Russell: "Work is of two kinds: first,altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid."
Don't get me wrong - the humor is still there, as when detailing (no pun intended) the basic difference between "crop Dusting" and "laying an egg".
The real message may lie in the introduction, and this quote from Bertrand Russell: "Work is of two kinds: first,altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid."
September 10, 2011
Even better than their precursor, The Idler's Glossary--possibly because while The Idler's Glossary celebrate the idle life, The Wage Slave's Glossary is an caustic, satiric attack on the rat race. Bright, philosophic, erudite, historical, contemporary, and painfully relevant, The Wage Slave's Glossary should be on every contrarian's best-seller list.
December 7, 2011
I won this book from goodreads. This book was fun to read,and informative. All the information was well researched. It's a dictionary like book not a story but there's plenty added to keep you interested. This is a good book to keep in the bathroom or the car, when you need to kill a small bit of time. I could also see putting it in a work themed gift basket.
June 15, 2012
I was expecting something like The meaning of Liff, but it wasn't. The introduction was very interesting, but the rest not so much. If the whole book was as good as the introduction i'd given it four stars.
June 30, 2012
Capitalism sucks. Work sucks. This book is terrific, and even better, it guides me toward other books that seem well worth a look.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews