Job: Hi ho, hi ho

it's off to irk we go

My mate Nick and his wife moved recently to a newly built home in a small town north of Wellington. As with most new builds, the house is spat and polished to within a few micromillimetres of its life, while the section is a desolate landscape crying out for its owners to dedicate the remaining years of what was supposed to be a leisurely semi-retirement to prettying it up so, when they have karked it from exhaustion, the next occupants can enjoy a semirural paradise they had no hand in creating.

I learned this when I called Nick last week. As it happened, he and a friend had, not an hour earlier, finished installing a letterbox at the end of the drive. “I’ve gone outside at least three times already just to admire it,” he told me.

I do get that urge, as I’m sure you do too. Is there anything more satisfying, more demanding of repeated loving gazes, than a job well done - especially one that delivers an aesthetically pleasing result?

Who wouldn’t be proud? Go Nick!

I can’t speak for women, but for a bloke, extra gratification is provided by a job that stretches us to our physical limits, which Nick and I agreed is a bar met by an increasing number of tasks these days, such as putting on our shoes or brushing our teeth.

It’s not clear where the word job comes from. It’s been around since at least the mid-1500s as part of the phrase jobbe of work. It was distinct at that time from continuous labour, referring instead to a task of limited duration, which makes the theory that it may be a variant of gob plausible at least.

Gob itself is from gobbet, a 14th century word meaning lump or mouthful. It is not to be confused with goblet (which is easily done when writing a language newsletter early in the morning or suffering creeping cognitive decline), a type of drinking vessel. Gob may be connected to gab, another illness common among language newsletter writers, and one that appears to be without cure.

It isn’t until the 1650s that any record of job meaning a task done for pay is known, and another 200 years before it could refer to a paid position of employment, that state we devote endless energy to attaining, celebrate fulsomely when it is attained, and deeply regret a week or so after it begins.

Uncommon variants of job include as a British verb for actively buying and selling securities on the trading markets. Someone who does this is, naturally, called a jobber, although I believe other nouns are also popular among those who think dimly of the profession. A jobber is not to be confused with a broker - even if both are commonly believed to drive late model BMWs that have undergone an indicatorectomy - with the first trading on their own account and the second trading on behalf of clients. Jobbers are a dying breed these days thanks to the wonders of technology, aka automated trading systems.

Job, that unfortunate Old Testament fellow whose miseries were so great that they named a whole book after him, took his name from the Hebrew Iyyobh, which is thought by some scholars to mean “hated, persecuted” and by others to mean “the penitent one”. Consistent with many biblical accounts, Job’s wife, despite her important role in the whole unfortunate affair, is never named, although the Testament of Job, an apocryphal narrative that didn’t find its way into the Bible, names her as Sitis. For centuries, Christianity regarded her poorly, even going so far as to say Satan used her as an instrument to tempt Job to reject God. Later scholars have taken a softer view, with one stating, “Job's wife is the prototypical woman on the margin, whose iconoclastic words provoke defensive condemnation but whose insight serves as an irritant that undermines old complacencies”. That sounds a lot like a backhanded compliment to me, and maybe it’s no accident that after she scolds Job for trusting God, we hear no more of her.

In 1736 or thereabouts, someone with a dark soul indeed - and thus warranting great respect - came up with Job’s comforter for one who brings news of further misfortune.

One job we have to touch on (fnah, fnah) for this week’s post to come (hnyuk, hnyuk) to a fitting end is, of course, the blowjob, also known as fellatio. Fellatio, you’ll be tickled to know, is a recent word, coined in 1894 by English physician, eugenicist, social reformer and student of human sexuality Henry Havelock Ellis. Ellis was one of those rare souls for the time who didn’t regard homosexuality as a disease (or even immoral) and was also one of the first physicians to recognise transgenderism. He took fellatio from the Latin fellare, to suck. Before Ellis got going, other writers had coined fellator (the one performing the act), fellatrice or fellatrix for a female fellator, and fellation for the act itself. Fellate didn’t enter the language until the 1960s.

Why it’s called a blowjob when little or no blowing is generally involved is a matter of debate. One theory holds that it’s for humorous effect, like the idiom “cheap at half the price”. Another is that it’s for the effect it has on the recipient. Like fellate, it’s a latecomer to the language; in the 1930s you could blow (someone) off, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that anyone gave anyone else an actual blowjob.

In their 2009 book Superfreakanomics, Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner note the increasing popularity of oral sex among paying customers as well as among teenagers at the time. They put it down to disappearing taboos, which also played a part in prostitutes charging relatively less for that service than their counterparts 100 years earlier had. Of course, it doesn’t hurt either that no one has ever fallen pregnant through oral sex.

One last story. When I was about seven I developed an allergic rash to something on our farm which led to an outbreak of hives, followed by a day of diarrhoea and, that evening, sudden difficulty in breathing. The doctor was immediately summoned (this was a long time ago, remember) and on his arrival he asked me a number of questions, including “have you done any big jobs today?” In my innocence, I replied, “I helped Mum put the groceries away.”

That was the day I learned yet another meaning of job - one that no dictionary I’ve scanned today seems to recognise, but that Wikipedia, bless its scatalogical heart, does.

---

Bits and specious

The quote about Job’s wife is taken from this article by American biblical scholar Carol A Newsom. For a deeper study, check out her work The Book of Job: A Conflict of Moral Imaginations.

Why does the mere sound of some words get under your skin? And why do so many languages’ words for red have an r in them?

---

Quote of the week

Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.
Robert Orben