Sunday 17 March 2024

Job Idioms

Several words have found themselves used in a number of phrases. We looked at 'elephant' last time and this time it's 'job'.

Job lot is first recorded in 1832, but an earlier obsolete sense of ‘cartload’ and even ‘lump’ existed. Now this earlier sense probably has a different etymological trail (albeit the same root) in an early Germanic gob which, again, means ‘lump.

Job is used in the slang sense of ‘theft, robbery’ from 1722.


Nobody is recorded as being ‘on the job’ until 1882 – no, then it would have been describing someone hard at work; which is clearly the beginnings of your initial understanding. Let’s move swiftly on.


Job security appears for the first time in 1932 – predictably job insecurity followed four years later.

Nobody ever thought of job sharing until 1972.

Job hunting was not seen in print until 1928.

The phrase ‘job of work’ is first seen in a work by Trollope in 1873.

Job is also used in the sense of ‘to buy and sell as a broker’ in the 1660s.

Another sense of ‘job’ is seen from 1721, when the word described those dealing in their own stocks and shares rather than using a broker.

In 1903 ‘job’ became slang for ‘cheat, betray’ – and from the earlier use of the word to mean ‘the perversion of justice for one’s own benefit’..

I’m not going to say nobody had a blowjob before 1961 - although earlier it had been simply ‘to blow (someone) off’ and had been since 1933 – because blow jobs were used as military slang from the 1950s, as USAF pilots used this to describe their jet aircraft.


In the 1940s the phrase ‘hand job’ appears, but describes ‘a piece of work done by hand’.

A nose job, correctly rhinoplasty, is seen from 1948.

Nobody was jobless until 1892.

And from the 1680s, and now obsolete, comes jobation, which is defined as ‘a long, tedious scolding’. Here the term probably comes from the Biblical character Job, he seen as a patriarchal figure (and a very wealthy individual).

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