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Before we get to examine a few Canadian job names, we must explicate the title engraving chosen for its aptness to today’s theme: work. “Vulcan at His Forge with Mars and Venus” is an engraving done in 1543 after an earlier painting by Parmigianino. You can see this one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Poor, hard-working, lame, old Vulcan is bent to his work making a finely reticulated iron net. In the bed behind him, Venus, Vulcan’s wife, demonstrates unusual views as to the definition of marriage. She cavorts openly with a strange man wearing a helmet. That dude is Mars, the Roman god of war. It is clear the couple are not reviewing their Greek noun declensions. Vulcan made the net, cast it over the lovers and caught them. This farrier of the Olympians, Vulcan, was no slouch as a blacksmith. Deft at the forge, he made the magic arrows used by Cupid himself. Vulcan (Hephaistos in Greek) was also armourer to the gods. He forged and fitted the very breastplate of Zeus.
 

Canadian Occupation Names

Some of these occupational names were coined by Canadians, some we borrowed. A few are still in use; others have gone, worn down by the sandpaper of use or cast aside for newer terms in the techno-rush of history.

Burgess in Saskatchewan

Persistent remnants of colonial vocabulary sometimes linger like sagebrush entangled in a prairie fence. Saskatchewan has a term, unique in Canada, for a citizen who owns property and pays local taxes.

A burgess in Saskatchewan is equivalent to what is called elsewhere in Canada a ratepayer. The English word burgess harks all the way back to 1066 CE, when the Normans invaded and conquered England and northern French words poured into English. The Old French word was burgeis, its form traceable to a Late Latin adjective burgensis ‘town dweller.’ Burgess is an Anglo-Norman transformation of what became the French noun and adjective bourgeois, whose prime meaning was citizen of a bourg, or burg, a fortified town, from Late Latin burgus ‘castle’ or’ fort.’ Burgus traces its lineage to the Vikings, who spoke Old Norse. To them a borg was ‘a wall,’ then ‘a wall around a town,’ then ‘a town.’ This wall was at first made of wooden boards, and the related Old Norse word for that slat, borth, eventually gives the English term for a piece of lumber, a board.

A medieval walled bourg or village protected by a castle

The occupational word burgess has had several specific English meanings over the last nine hundred years. It first meant a freeman of a borough or town, one who could vote and enjoy the other full rights of a citizen. By the time of late Middle English, roughly during the fifteenth century, a burgess was a member of parliament for a borough. Later, in early American colonies like Virginia, a burgess was a rep sent by towns to the legislative body of colonial Virginia. In 1619 CE, there assembled the first elected legislative body in American history at Jamestown, Virginia, and it was called the House of Burgesses.

Here’s the word in a majestic rollcall written in 1755 by Jonathan Swift: “All persons of honour, lords spiritual and temporal, gentry, burgesses and commonalty.”

In England , before the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, a burgess was a magistrate of the governing body of a town.

Early on, German used the burg root to mean ‘fortress,’ as in Martin Luther’s great Protestant hymn, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott ‘A mighty fortress is our God.’ A portrait of Luther is featured on the CD cover at the right.

The root is a fertile seed for words in European languages, giving English words like borough, burglar, burrow, hamburger, and the common German noun for citizen, Bürger, and its elaborations like the usual German word for mayor of a town, Bürgermeister. Distantly but surprisingly related are the English verb to bury and its noun burial, both derived from a supposed Old Teutonic verb *bergan ‘to cover, to protect as a wall does a garden.’

 

Cradle-Rocker

In placer mining, a cradle-rocker is a trough on a wooden or metal rocker used to separate gold flecks from sand and earth by washing and shaking the muddy gravel in water, and then, if necessary, using mercury to collect the gold. A prospector who performs such a task may also be called a cradle-rocker.

 

Depot farmer

A depot farmer grew and supplied food to lumber camps, often after the grueling work of clearing a few acres in the bush for tillable land. Potatoes for the lumbermen and oats for their horses were the main crops. Outbuildings on the farm might be used by the lumber company to store equipment and supplies. Such a depot farm was often owned by the lumber company itself, and the shanty farmer was its employee.

 

Donkey Puncher

Donkey puncher? Oh no! Must we traverse the tricky trap of animal abuse? Rest easy, lovers of the domestic ass. A small, auxiliary engine was first called a donkey in the British navy. From ships it spread to mean any of the small engines used in the British Columbia lumber industry. The lumberman who operated these log-pulling engines was the donkey puncher or donkey jammer or donkeyman. For his perpetual safety, let us bray.

A donkey consists of a steam boiler and steam engine connected to a winch mounted on a 'sled' called a 'donkey sled'. The donkeys or sleds were moved by simply 'dragging themselves' with the winch line. They were used to move logs, by attaching lines to the logs and hauling them. A donkey puncher was the machine operator.

There is an obscene meaning of donkey punch, which I do not intend to explicate here and thus mayhap besmirch these lily-white realms of gentility and innocence. Those interested in coarser matters may pursue them by clicking below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_punch

 

Draegerman

In the technical jargon of Maritime coal mining operations, a draegerman is a specially trained rescue worker. A draeger was a gas-mask that permitted descent into tunnels where poisonous seepage had occurred. A.B. Dräger, a German physicist and engineer, invented the mask, originally to protect German soldiers during gas warfare in the trenches of World War One. But canny Canadian soldiers brought the idea back to their Nova Scotia mines after the war.

 

Field Pitcher

In the lingo of prairie harvest terms, a field pitcher is one of the treshing hands. He’s the guy who forks sheaves up onto the hay wagon to make a load. Sometimes he’s called a stook-pitcher. He’s not to be confused with the spike-pitcher who pitchforks sheaves from the load into the separator.

 

Hog Reeve

This phrase has nothing to do with swine flu. A hog reeve was an historical municipal official in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, whose stern duty it was to collect stray pigs and tote up any damage to property done by wandering swine. The term may have been imported to or exported from our Canadian Maritimes, because we find it listed as an elected office in early New Hampshire township records.

Although he was called hog reeve or hog reefe, he supervised the behaviour of all domestic livestock permitted to graze on town commons or in neighbouring woods. If “estrays” browsed in cultivated fields and did damage, the hog reeve rounded them up and kept them fenced until the owners came, paid a minimal penalty and retrieved their errant beasts. Unfortunately the hog reeve's occupational power was never extended to encompass damage caused by elected municipal officials. By the selection of our graphic, we do not imply that Prince Edward Island hog reeves earned extra dollars by guarding Snow White.

 

Rock Doctor

Geology abounds with technical terms not generally known to lithic laymen, jawbreakers like geognosy, Wiesenboden, and orography. At the other, more playful end of geological jargon is this nugget of Canadian mining slang. A rock doctor is any geologist.

 

Canadian folk sayings about work

We shall close with one of the most renowned depictions of laziness in art, Pieter van der Heyden’s “Desidia or Sloth,” one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth is sometimes called by its Greek-based synonym: acedia. In this 1558 copperplate engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the principal figure sleeps in the foreground, a frowsy woman using a donkey for a pillow. Around her cavort the usual Bruegelian suspects demonstrating with gleeful lewdness all the subsidiary debasements of indolence. The Latin tag translates as “sloth breaks one’s strength and withers the nerves.”

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net