“The Plural Meaning of Work: Exploring its Etymology and Social Implications”

The concept of work is at the heart of our lives and, in many ways, of our social project. However, its meaning is plural, often cloudy and sometimes unfairly reduced to the notion of employment. As for its etymology, it is the subject of lively debate between linguists and… political activists. Decryption.

A word that covers several realities

Ask anyone if he worked today, he will answer you yes or no depending on whether he exercised… a remunerated activity. In the collective imagination, to work is therefore to accomplish a task for money (or, during childhood, to study in order, later… to accomplish a task for money).

However, if we refer to the Dictionary of the French Academy, work is synonymous with “labor, application to a task, sustained effort to do something”. Thus, sociologists speak more and more of “unpaid work”: cleaning, cooking, shopping, parenthood, voluntary work, activism, contributions to Wikipedia…

All of these tasks, which one undertakes either out of obligation or out of a desire to participate in the community, require effort. Not to mention the inequalities between men and women, the latter devoting 50% more time to household chores. Should politicians then stop talking about “work value” and talk about “employment value”? Maybe. It is also partly in the name of this unpaid work that some are calling for a universal income.

Have you gone to teletorture?

You must have heard it here or there: “work” would come from the Latin ” triple which designates an instrument of torture made up of three stakes. Proposed by the linguist Alain Rey, this explanation has caused much ink to flow: work is torture, therefore a source of suffering, therefore to be banned. This obviously raises several questions. Already, what does the etymology of a word really tell us about the nature of what it designates today? And, again, are we talking about work or employment?

Still, this explanation is very quickly challenged by Marie-France Delport, another linguist. For her, the word derives from the Latin ” trans which expresses the idea of ​​a “journey that involves obstacles”. The work would therefore be the path that goes from an intention to an achievement, with its share of difficulties. These two theories are obviously the subject of linguistic, but also political confrontations. Note quickly that several other explanations have been proposed, all of which involve the notion of effort. Will the experts ever agree? Maybe, but sorting it all out will take… a lot of work.