If I was a in waste management, I DON’T believe the term “garbage man” would irk me, (I’ve never heard the term “garbage person” or “garbage woman”, probably because I’ve never seen one). I can see why that might offend some people though.
I don’t understand the sensitivity with “janitor” or “secretary” though. Why is this?
It’s just the Euphemism Treadmill at work. Secretarial and janitorial work is seen as lower-class, so “nicer” words are created to attempt to ameliorate the connotation. Hence “administrative assistant”, which emphasizes that administrative responsibility is involved, and “sanitary engineer”, because everyone knows that engineering is hot stuff.
The ironic part is that “secretary” used to be a perfectly straightforward title of a responsible, often prestigious position. It meant the person entrusted with the correspondance of an office. It’s still the title of government officials in cabinet positions. I remember being confused the first time I read a British work of fiction where the “secretary” was a man, and one who was not simply the office gofer either.
I’ve been trying to figure this one out, too. Not sure there is a factual answer. The first time I became aware of the “administrative assistant” title was in the early 80’s. Our organization had secretaries, but there was also one administrative assistant reporting to the director. She really got rankled if you referred to her as a secretary. The secretaries did everyday support tasks like typing memos (yes, we still had typewriters, though nobody seemed to take dictation), filing, maybe taking minutes at meetings, stuff like that. The administrative assistant had to understand a lot more about what the director was actually doing, and was almost (but not quite) a deputy.
I think thereafter followed “title inflation.” With the advent of computers, administrative staff had to have more training and more skills (not that shorthand was a piece of cake, mind you). I think that at some point somebody who learned MS Word for DOS probably said, “I’m not a secretary. I know how to use a computer!”
BTW my MIL used to work for the Secretary of the International Monetary Fund, and he was pretty damn important.
I don’t think that PC figures into it, at all. As others have noted, it was much more a matter of title inflation than anything else. Once the title was made more grandiose as “administrative assistant,” the title “secretary” would have simply indicated a “lesser” job. Not demeaning in itself, but no longer indicative of the responsibilities that it entailed. (Which, in itself, was silly, since secretaries have long been known for the power they wielded in offices.)
My mom laid it out for me real simple one time.
“Why do they call you a secretary?”
“Because I know all the secrets.”
FWIW, I was once a secretary and my boss was an administrative assistant.
I cannot find it now, but I remember the NYC “garbage men” pushing to do away with that name since they found it offensive and preferred something like “garbage collectors” or something else that didn’t sound like they were men made of garbage. Eventually they came to be known as “New York’s Strongest” just like the police are the finest and the firemen (which are not made of fire, btw) are the bravest.
(I know this is not what you were asking but since you mentioned it…)
They’re actually called “sanitation workers” now, with “New York’s Strongest” as their officially endorsed nickname. The -est fad has affected other public sector employment areas of New York City as well. Jail guards are now “New York’s Boldest.” Public school teachers are now “New York’s Brightest.”
Feh.
Former member of Professional Secretaries International…
The shift in title to “administrative assistant” reflected a shift in duties, from the more routine typing and filing to being facilitator and amanuensis for the executive, knowing what he would want and how to make it happen. The distinction in roles which was valid in the 70s and 80s, as described in Cooking with Gas’s post, shifted so that competent secretaries were doing AA work. Typically the executive would produce a non-fancy thought piece, the AA would format it both for appearance and for appropriate distribution (Interoffice Memo? Policy Statement? Letter to Major Client? Put the right format around the content.). And of course the less competent jumped on the bandwagon, and wanted the “prestige” title too.
This was true (at least as far I understand it) until around 1900. Then the typewriter turned up and suddenly company correspondence was no longer the preserve of the rich and famous, and became a menial task. Since women were cheaper than men, the secretarial demographic changed and expanded.
1900 - 1960 or so
That typing pool full of women was in full swing, but times were a changing, thanks to Xerox
1960 - 1990
The typing was obsolete thanks to the photo copier, but male bosses were not competent enough to use something as complicated as a typewriter. They still needed a young lady in a short skirt to help with the tech stuff
1990 - today
Men finally began to decipher the mysteries of the keyboard and secretaries in the traditional sense were no longer necessary. Men, of course, begged to differ and secretaries with short skirts were needed for obvious reasons. Being paid to wear a mini skirt is not a career path.
Does anybody here watch the tv program Mad Men? It graphically portrays the enormous gap that existed between the people, overwhelmingly men, who did the “real” work, and the invisible, interchangeable, lowly people, overwhelmingly women, in the office world. (There were even more lowly people even more invisible who were often black.)
Class, sex, and race all played roles in this set of dichotomies. You did not easily mix between the two worlds and those who did - like Peggy the aspiring copywriter or Paul with his black girlfriend - were made to feel uncomfortable about their transgression every day.
This was the social reality of the entire American society most of the way through the 1960s. (Many people consider this period to be a wonderful era that they’d like the world to get back to. Baffling.)
People have always challenged class, sex, and racial boxes but the real wars started to pervade every aspect of American society only in the 1960s. They haven’t really stopped since, even though basic attitudes have shifted to an incredible extent in my adult lifetime.
This has little or nothing to do with PC. Women started fighting for more recognition of their real accomplishments before PC was a term anybody knew. So did lower class workers. It’s really not much different from blacks not wanting to be called negroes. PC is a red herring. People use PC today in a manner that has little to do with its origins, which appear to be more of an extension of these terms of recognition and respect to other types of differences. Today’s use of PC is more of a lament: “why can’t I insult people to their faces the way I want to?”
The terms changed because the world changed. The change didn’t take place by accident. It happened only because millions of people fought for change every day of their lives for decades. You don’t have to fight this hard unless the other side is incredibly powerful and entrenched. These successes have only lead to more fighting over even more entrenched cultural norms. Those digging in their heels will lose in the end, because the force of history has been against them constantly and shows no sign of changing. What seems to ignored, forgotten, or not understood is that it’s all part of the same process.
>They still needed a young lady in a short skirt to help with the tech stuff
Hilarious, all men are incompetent and sexist! You should write for a bottom barrel sitcom!
The interesting bit is that it would be quite a demotion for Hillary Clinton to go from secretary to administrative assistant.
Not baffling at all if you’re a white male with no social conscience (and that’s a pretty sizable demographic). Why wouldn’t you want to return to a time when your group was top dog?
If she doesn’t know how to type of file, she’s not a secretary.
“Personal assistant” indeed.
There actually is a whole branch of engineering that used to be called “Sanitary Engineering,” which involved the engineering design of water and wastewater treatment plants, water distribution systems, wastewater collection systems, pumping stations, sanitary landfills, etc.
By the time I went to school, this had expanded to include hazardous waste investigation and remediation, and the name had changed to “Environmental Engineering.”
In any event, nobody has any business calling themselves an engineer without the appropriate education (i.e. an engineering degree), at a minimum.
–robby, P.E.
A cartoon by Hector Breeze depicts a guy in the dock wearing a mask and a striped jersey, and carrying a bag marked ‘Swag’.
His counsel advises the judge, “M’lud, my client describes himself as a compulsory ownership transference executive”.
I dare say there are any number of sappers and locomotive drivers who might have other thoughts about that. 
Most legal assistants don’t get offended if you refer to them as secretaries.
I think the word might just have gone out of use because it was so ubiquitous as a term for “typist” AND “scheduling person” AND in the high office/government sense.
I’m an Administrative Staff Associate II or some bullshit like that. I insist that my bosses refer to me as their secretary or their assistant.