Friday words #278

By | August 13, 2021

Sometimes new-to-me words conk me over the head and say “Here, pay attention.” So it’s been in the last couple of weeks with the word precariat, which showed up in an article (paywalled) in the New Yorker and then in a novel I’m reading.

The word’s meaning might not be obvious if you see it out of context like this, but the sentences where I found it give a clue:

“The miseries and indignities that this country visits on its precariat class are enough […] to make anyone want to join a cult.” (New Yorker)

“What about the so-called precariat, then? Those middle billions just scraping by, what Americans still call the middle class.” (novel)

As it turns out, precariat is a portmanteau of precarious and proletariat. The word is contrasted with the salariat, workers who receive salaries.

The word precariat is a negative term, but it’s not negative about the people in the precariat class; it’s negative about the economic situation they find themselves in. The economist Guy Standing has an article in which he describes the precariat as an emerging class. Characteristics of the precariat include “flexible” labor contracts (the quotation marks are his); exclusively money wages, i.e., no benefits; no occupational identity; interestingly, an expectation of education beyond what the work requires; and finally, no safety net, such as no unemployment benefits. As Standing says, “the overall result is that they live on the edge of unsustainable debt and in chronic economic uncertainty.”

I get different takes on how old the word is. Dictionary.com says it was first recorded 1955–1960; Oxford says 1980s; the first cite in the OED is from 1989. The word appears more often in British dictionaries, possibly because Standing is a British economist and his work might be better known there.

Now that I’ve seen this word, I fully expect to encounter it frequently from now on. Perhaps you will, too?

Update: As Nancy Friedman points out in her blog post on precariat, there’s a kind of patron saint of the precariat: San Precario, as invented in 2004 in Italy.

For origins today, the word glitch. We use the term today to mean any sort of malfunction or snag. When I looked into it, I was surprised (a little) to learn that the word originally was more specific: it referred to an electrical surge or unexpected change in voltage. In this sense, Douglas Harper has some cites from the 1950s, but he says it goes back to the 1940s in radio and broadcast slang.

The word glitch apparently moved into popular consciousness during the American space program of the early 1960s, including into the nascent computer industry. As it explains in the Jargon File, glitches can be hard to debug (“a glitch is one of many causes of electronic heisenbugs“).

The OED is oddly shy about the word’s origins (“etymology unknown”), but almost everyone else is happy to assert that glitch comes from either Yiddish (glitshen), or from German (glitschen). In German and Yiddish, the word means “to slip, slide.”

Update: Ben Zimmer pointed me to a more extensive discussion of the origins of glitch in a piece he wrote for the Visual Thesaurus site, which traces the word back to radio lingo for a mistake from 1940 or earlier.

A closely related German word is gleiten, meaning “to slide, skid.” If you peer at that word, you might recognize a cognate in English: to glide. I guess it makes sense metaphorically that a glitch is a kind of gliding. Maybe?

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