Chrysti The Wordsmith: Labor Terms

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. Industries that operate around the clock rely on shift workers in order to stay in production seven days a week. A 24 hour working period generally consists of the day the swing and the graveyard shifts. The word shift has many meanings in English. One of them dating from fifteen hundred to means manner of livelihood. Work or labor. It's kin to the term shift less meaning lazy and inefficient. Literally incapable of shifting or working for oneself by 1810 the word shift came to suggest the span of time that a group of laborers were assigned to work swing shift workers usually start their days at 4pm and punch out at midnight. Swing Shift. A term invented in the mid-1940s was so devised because the work period seems to overlap or swing halfway between a regular day shift and a full night shift. Folks who put in their eight hours between midnight and 8 a.m. work the graveyard shift this term may have a

nautical origin on ships it was called the graveyard watch. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the expression graveyard watch to a 1928 document which explained quote the watch from midnight until 4 a.m. so called on account of the silence throughout the ship. So cemeteries with their pervasive stillness provide an apt image for the silence of the graveyard shift hours. I'm Christie the wordsmith Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.