Re: A Job of Work

Mike Lyle wrote:
Peter Duncanson (BrE) wrote:
On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:30:02 -0500, Fran Kemmish
<fkemmish@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]
quoted from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/08/steele-confuses-stephanop_n_164991.html


So Mr Steele is making a distinction between "work" which is
short-term, and "a job" which is something long term - if I am
following his line of reasoning.

I would have thought, though, if I were to make that distinction
between the two terms (which I really wouldn't) that it would be
rather the other way around. A "job" is a discrete and
circumscribed lot of "work".

Any thoughts?

I had similar thoughts while reading that.

However, I think I can just about see what Michael Steele was getting
at with his use of "job".
COED:
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/job

1 a paid position of regular employment.
2 a task or piece of work.

A person having a job in sense 1 may well perform a series of tasks
(pieces of work, jobs).

But I don't think Steele's attempt to hijack "job" for the ongoing,
with no predetermined end, and "work" for the short-term is useful,
helpful or successful.

But I remember reading, many years ago, somebody's account of his unemployed father's having cycled across town for some "work". The writer specifically contrasted "work", a brief engagement, with "job", which he said they'd have regarded as far too optimistic, adding that a "career" would have seemed ludicrously fanciful. Context-dependent, innit.


Indeed; but "some work" in that context suggests to me the sort of odd job that you might otherwise give to a Boy Scout for "bob a Job Week" (do they still do that?)

The electrician who was working on the heating in our apartment today, told me that he had to "bring someone from another job to finish this job", and I don't think he was expecting to make the lad's career out of my heating problem.

Am I right that* countable "work" now seems to exist only in the plural, as in "road works", or in fixed compounds, as in a "breastwork"?


What about a "work of art"?

Fran
.

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