What was it like
before there was a weekend?
Well, if you can rustle up one of Wells’ Time Machines and head back to about 1900, you’ll find out.
Or, use this
shortcut: consult the Corpus of Historical American English, courtesy of the
good folks at Brigham Young University. This dataset contains 400 million words
from books, magazines and newspapers published 1810-2000. Analysts can
determine the frequency of specific words used at different times in our
history.
For example,
“weekend” as we know it was mostly non-existent prior to 1900.
That’s because most
working people were on the job at least six days a week. A mill in New England
was the first American enterprise to set a five-day week for its workers, and
other businesses started to follow that example. In the Great Depression, the
two-day weekend was firmly implanted in the workplace—some policy wonks
considered it to be a partial remedy for unemployment (more people would be hired
to make up for “lost” productivity on Saturdays and Sundays). “Weekend” finally
entered our day-to-day vocabulary in the 1950s.
“Overtime” didn’t
get popular until the 1940s, doubtless stimulated by wartime production
exigencies.
Finally, “commuter”
peaked in popularity in the 1960s-1970s, perhaps because commuting was a
relatively new phenomenon as the federal highway system blossomed and
suburbanization started to become a factor in changing residential and work
patterns.
Oh yeah, “conservative”
is a late bloomer, it wasn’t really used a lot until the second half of the 20th
century, while “liberal” has been high on the charts since James Monroe sailed
into the presidency in 1820—but that’s a story for another post.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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