As an engineer and someone with many close friends in a wide variety of the sciences, I have never, to a single person, ever heard anyone consider the going out and gathering data part to be the dull bit, and analysis the fun bit.
It certainly is, and if that’s the job title routinely used by the people who do that (difficult and crucial) job, I have no problem with that whatsoever.
What I guess I was trying to get at is that I wouldn’t use such phrases metaphorically in situations that have nothing to do with their original contexts. If I as a non-farmer say something like “I’ve been working like a field hand today”, I don’t think that comes across as a tribute to the industriousness of agricultural laborers. I think it comes across as a tone-deaf archaism from the days when many white Americans just unthinkingly treated the history of Black hardships and oppression as a sort of curious folklore for spicing up their own colloquial speech with vivid idioms.
Indeed, it’s almost a cliché for a senior researcher/engineer to bemoan the fact that they are stuck in the lab/office these days and never get to do the fun stuff.
In Canada, in the Red River area, there were two different groups: mixed race people with a French/First Nations background, and mixed race with an English/Scots/First Nations background. “Métis” was used in the mid-19th century to refer to the community that had a French background, likely speaking French, and “half-breed” to the community that had a British background, likely speaking English. “Métis” is ultimately derived from the Latin term for “mixed”, which has a similar implication as “half-breed”, but is generally now the accepted term in Canada, as the linguistic distinction has disappeared. (I believe the Spanish equivalent is “mestizo”.)
I used to work in a museum, and one day a foreign visitor asked me, “Why is fried chicken racist?” I did tell him fried chicken wasn’t racist, it’s just delicious, and I followed that up by doing my best to explain the racist associations have with the golden delicious food and African Americans.
It’s not unrewarding by its nature; it’s only unrewarding if the people doing it are getting otherwise mistreated. Set up properly, it can be very rewarding; and I believe it’s supposed to be in the figurative sense also – I see that posters later in the thread agree with this.
A good deal of what bothers me about this is the assumption that of course “field work” is something that nobody really wants to do. I’m doing literal field work and it’s for me the best part of the job.
I am American but not Black. If this is indeed upsetting Black people, then I agree that something needs to be done. But I’m still bothered by the assumption that field work is something that’s on some level essentially Wrong.
But that (and other info in that post) does indeed seem like they’re trying to cover up continuing actual mistreatment by changing the name applied to it. If you’re still expecting people to pick lettuce for 14 hours a day in high temperatures without access to enough shade or water, it’s not going to help a bit if you call them Lactucaceae Harvest Specialists instead. And if you do that as part of your hiring process because you’re trying to conceal the actual nature of the job, then it not only doesn’t help, it makes it worse.
I would take it just to mean you’ve been working hard. But then, most of the people I know who are doing literal field work are white.
If it were clear that you meant by it not only that you’d been working hard but that you’d been doing something you thought unpleasant and demeaning, I’d be annoyed by it.
Yeah. Everybody eats fried chicken (well, not vegetarians.) The problem is when fried chicken is presented as particularly appropriate to be eaten by or with Black people. Same thing with watermelon.
“Let’s have fried chicken and watermelon for dinner”? Not racist. “We (not Black) are having X [Black people] over for dinner, so we’d better have fried chicken and watermelon” – yes racist.
Exactly. I’ve spoken with farmers who find it very rewarding to be out in the fields, close to nature, growing food for people to eat. They often say they can’t understand how I can enjoy working at a desk in an office.
To my ear, “work in the community” suggests community organizing, serving food at a homeless shelter, volunteering for Meals On Wheels, and such. “Fieldwork” implies work done in the community directly related to the discipline - the field - of social work.
Indeed.
Different people need different things; including different types of work. The problem isn’t that there are some types of work that are inherently worse than others; the problem is that some are less well respected (and often also less well paid) than others, some are set up so as to turn good work into terrible work because of the working conditions, and also that there are a lot of people in the wrong jobs, sometimes because they’ve been convinced that the work they ought to be doing is terrible work and they should be doing something the society defines as “better.”
Not only are people happier if they’re doing the right job for them, but also the work gets done better if the right people are doing it. Everybody benefits, including those using the results of the work (at least, if we’re using any metric other than ‘do this as cheaply as possible’, which often leads to setting up the work so that it is indeed terrible.)
Exactly.
On another note they had to talk with one of my HS teachers as he called all the males in his class “Boy”, such as “You, Boy, answer the question!”. It did not go over well with the Black students. Was he racist? Tone deaf? or Just too old fashioned?
AFAIK, the term “field hand” just means, “someone who does agricultural work in a field.” It’s not tied specifically to slavery, nor is it notably archaic. It wouldn’t occur to me to attach a racial subtext to, “I worked like a field hand,” although the phrase isn’t in my personal idiom, so I might be missing nuance. But none of the online dictionaries I looked at mentioned a racial angle except one, which had “a slave who works outdoors,” marked as a secondary, obsolete definition.
The teacher was obviously using the word “boy” in a racially insensitive and aggravating manner, whether intentional or just tone dead. That’s another relevant example, since surely nobody would suggest that the problem is intrinsic to the semantics of the word “boy”, which is not specifically associated with slavery.
That all depends on how well he responded to correction. Once it was explained to him the racist overtones of referring to any black man as “boy”, if he persisted, then he’s racist.
To put a point on that, the phrase they should be pointing to is “field nigger” as opposed to “house nigger”.
If you’re not aware of those phrases and their, both historic and current, connotations you can’t really understand, as one example, the subtext in the scenes between Django and Stephen in Django Unchained.
Right, and if that were taken to imply that “field” is tarnished and therefore necessarily problematic in other contexts, then we’d have to do away with “house” too.
I know I’m trying to change with my sons. I’ve been calling up “BOYS!” for years…they’re 20. That’s not going to fly much longer.
Other tapes had an adhesive like the old letter envelopes and postage stamps; you had to get the adhesive side wet, then press it to what you wanted it to stick to. My mother had tons of that stuff gathering dust in her garage when we cleaned out the old house.
I might be too much of a nerd to weigh in on this one, but the term I still hear end-users[1] use is “buggy” as in containing one or more bugs. The term itself refers to the fact that a problem in the execution of a program was discovered to be caused by a bug squashed behind the reading device on a hard drive which therefore prevented that device from reading the code it needed in order to tell the computer what to do. The bug has been preserved and I’ve seen it in a museum; I think it’s some kind of a tiny moth.
This was the interpretation I learned in the 1970’s in elementary school. More specifically, though, the term (as we used it) referred to giving something to someone and then later insisting it be given back – typically when the item was thought to be useless but was later seen as valuable. In this case, the term was historically unflattering to the giver (of European ancestry), not the Indian (who was receiving poor treatment in both transactions).
–G!
[1] Now there’s a dangerous term. The IT people at my company were asked not to use “End Users” because someone thought it sounded like a reference to something scatological or deviantly sexual and therefore unpleasant (I’ll have to guess ‘unpleasant to the person who was objecting at the time’ here). The IT department was asked to call the people who use the computers and software ‘tech consumers’ and, since technology is all around us from fire to wheels to electricity and everything in between ‘tech’ was assumed and ‘consumers’ was encouraged and that, of course, led to confusion about whether the reference was to consumers of our company’s service or consumers of IT hardware/software/networks/databases or consumers of managers’ time and attention or… I’m telling you, guys, there’s just no way to win…
OK, here you go. In high tech hardware we sometimes will have a version with fewer features but it’s basically the same thing with different firmware. Putting in the alternate firmware is referred to as crippling the part. This can be done to have two price points or because it would be illegal to have certain features in certain regions.
I agree, except for the bit about “nobody wants be that guy who deprecates appropriate changes just because there are also much bigger issues”. I’ve been happy to be that guy so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. 
Typically hilarious corporate nonsense. Forbid the use of a descriptive term like “end users” which actually describes what they are, and substitute “tech consumers”, which sounds like creatures that eat technology, or otherwise make it go away (as in “consumed by flames”). I tend to dislike the term “consumers” in many contexts because it’s not only so non-descriptive, but carries this weird connotation that their only purpose is to “consume” things rather than do anything productive with them. How about “users” or “customers”?
Totally agree. The usage goes back a very long way, and is still current AFAIK. It even predates the common use of firmware. Back in the day, for instance, IBM developed a line printer that was designed to print “x” number of lines per minute. Someone in marketing got the brilliant idea that they could expand their customer base by marketing a cheaper model that was 33% slower. The cheapest way to do this was to cripple the existing printer, and in the absence of firmware, the change was made by actually adding (at extra cost to IBM) a special circuit board that disabled every third print cycle.
So while the standard model would go “print print print print print”, the cheaper model would go “print print click print print click”. They were otherwise exactly the same machine.
IBM’s strategy worked fine for most businesses, but when these things were leased to universities, the clever minds of academia figured out the simple fix of pulling out the offending circuit board. And yes, these models, as shipped, were universally referred to as “crippled” printers.
Punchline there being that “crippled”, “nerfed”, etc. are standard terms in many flavors of engineering, both hard & soft. But are not terms much used by ordinary citizens going about their daily lives. In terms of corporate-speak they’re terms used internally, never publicly.
I wonder about trim and especially engine levels in cars in this context. If a particular model of car is available with e.g. an inline 4, a turbo-ed inline 4, or a larger displacement turbo-ed V-6, do automotive engineers & marketers refer to the small-engine model as “crippled”? Heckifino.