I have just finished reading Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell’s account of nauseating poverty in post WWI Europe. Obviously I don’t have too much in common with the life of a 1920’s tramp (Were I a hobo, for instance, I would never be caught dead in a necktie and bowler hat), but I was definitely moved by Orwell’s writing. Sure 1920’s English tramp slang is about as comprehensible to me as that click language in Southern Africa, but it led me to question the way in which I describe my own joblessness.
After much thought I have decided I am not “unemployed”. The prefix “un” means “not” and, according to Dictionary.com, is “freely used as an English formative, giving negative or opposite force in adjectives and their derivative adverbs and nouns”. When it comes to describing my own situation, I think the negative and opposite aspect of “un” is particularly illuminating.
Unless you some how have found an internship with real responsibilities (and are a big enough sucker to do that without finding some way to get paid), an internship may give good experience but isn’t really “employment”. Being helpful my doing minor tasks and adding a little youth to the office may build some professional skills but I certainly wouldn’t call it “employment”.
Because most of my professional experience comes from internships I have never really been employed, and thus how can I be the opposite of “employed” when I’ve never been in that state before? Good-bye the social stigma of unemployment, hello lazy privilege.
Indeed, for all the bourgeois coddled brothers out there, I want to posit a new term: non-employed. The prefix “non” means an “absence or negation of something”, so since I have had an absence of employment in my life, I am thus “nonemployed” and not “unemployed”.
There, don’t you feel better about your existence on this planet now? Thanks, semantics!
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