Jobs and Hands*

I am reading The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental, edited by Zdravko Radman (MIT Press, 2013). It is a collection of essays centering on the hand and its role in shaping human life and cognition—all very interesting. Many jobs are assigned to the hands, from determining egocentric space to acting as a medium of thought. The hands are busy organs, constructing our world and our mind. They perform many important jobs.

            In my 2011 seminar I noted the ubiquity of the hand in all human activity, from work to play, from science to art, from sex to surgery. All human work involves the hand. This makes it semantically peculiar that we use the term “manual labor” in a very restricted way, to refer to certain kinds of occupation (generally regarded as lowly). We conventionally distinguish between “brain jobs” and “hand jobs” (literally, manual labor)—cerebral versus manual occupations. But this is misleading, because all jobs are hand involving: surgeon, hairdresser, even philosopher (because of writing). Indeed, the gesturing hands are involved in most speech. So all jobs are really hand jobs. Equally, all jobs are “brain jobs”: even a ditch digger has to use his brain. So this conventional distinction collapses (and with certain kinds of social prejudice).

            This (as I noted) makes the contemporary use of the phrase “hand job” particularly strange. Before the introduction of this phrase in its current meaning (by what is called the “sex trade”) no one would have blinked an eye at the use of “hand job”. (I don’t know when this was but I would guess the 1970s.) Imagine someone saying, “I used to have a hand job, but now I have a brain job”, before the current sexual meaning of “hand job” came into existence. No one would bat an eyelid. The phrase is now virtually taboo (as I have discovered!), yet semantically it is perfectly innocuous. Even to use the phrase “job done by the hand” now risks sniggers and censure. Can we not recover it for “respectable” use? Must it be indelibly associated with sex acts? Thus I made a bold bid for linguistic rehabilitation (all this was clear to members of my seminar). And indeed it is not difficult, by repetition and suitable intonation, to rid the phrase of its contemporary narrow meaning (and some amusement is to be had by such an exercise). Again we can employ the phrase “hand job” in its original meaning and not be found coarse or worse.

            For those keen to celebrate the hand and all the jobs it does for us this seems a worthwhile project. Let us then reclaim “hand job” to praise the hand not to tarnish it!  Why should we let a perfectly good and useful English phrase be hijacked and debased by the sex trade? They can use some other phrase—how about “fist pump”?

*I am grateful to Ed Erwin for useful discussions on the subject of this (brief) paper.