Wednesday, July 7: Tune It Or Die!
NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS
by Rob Lopresti
I opened the latest Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the lead story was by Clark Howard. The editorial note reported that he has been “a professional writer for more than forty years.”
Well, yes. I thought. Very professional he is. But that’s not what you meant.
And that got me thinking of how many shades of meaning a single word can have.
So it was time to take a peek at the Oxford English Dictionary. Turns out the oldest meaning of professional (eighth century) relates to joining a religious order (one who professes one’0s faith).
By 1600 it meant someone who did something for money. The same century brought the meaning of belonging to a profession.
The next meaning in the OED, arriving in the 1700s, was a surprise to me. It meant a declaration (again, one who professes) with an undertone of insincerity: to be professional meant talking the talk without walking the walk. Of course, we still sometimes use the word in that denigrating way. “He doesn’t mean what he says, he’s a professional spokesman.” And by 1800 people it was also a nasty word for habitual: “a professional parasite.”
By the 1780s it was taking on one of today’s common meanings: only learned occupations, especially medicine and law.
By 1811 Jane Austen was distinguishing between professional and amateur musicians. But did she mean the pros got paid, or that they made a living at it? The Olympics Committee used to ban as professionals people who had been paid for sports even once.
I think EQMM meant that Howard has made his living as a writer for forty years, and more power to him. The definition I had in mind when I read EQMM is actually from the 1920s: competent, possessing the knowledge and skills expected in a field.
On the other hand, in crime fiction a professional is usually an assassin. Which is odd because the far older crime-related meaning of the word is prostitute. (When a cop arrests a pro I wonder which word he thinks he is abbreviating?)
This reminds me of my high school days when a friend told me a mutual acquaintance had “lost his amateur status.” He meant that the man had engaged the services of a pro, not in this case an assassin.
By the way, in that short story Clark Howard wrote of a librarian (I don’t have the text in front of me…) that she had ”a Dewey Decimal mind.” So apparently there are some professionals who may not be too happy with him.
Let’s eat
Somehow all these shades of context and meaning remind me of a joke I heard when I was a wee whippersnapper. Here’s a version I found on the web.
For foreigners, a “yankee” is an American. For American southerners, a “yankee” is a northerner. For northerners, a “yankee” is somebody from New England. For New Englanders, a “yankee” is somebody from Vermont. For Vermonters, a “yankee” is somebody who eats apple pie for breakfast.
And if the person wins money at a pie eating contest, I guess he’s a professional, too.
At the risk of being slightly off-topic: There’s a hilarious scene in an episode of Friends where Joey claims he could easily portray a stuffy college professor in a commercial.
Joey: “‘Hello, I’m your professor. When I’m not busy thinking of important things or, uh, … professing, I like to use…’ Oh, what’s the product?”
Being a stuffy college professor myself, I have to admit Joey’s job description is pretty much spot-on.
Confessional isn’t the opposite of Professional, but they’re related.
Usually when I use the term “professional” as a noun, I mean a person who works in one of the (originally four, but to which I have appended the last) five professions: Medicine, Law, Holy Orders, Arms, and Education. I define a Profession itself as a paid occupation that is neither an Art, Science, nor Trade, but which combines elements of all three, and is governed by an internal code of ethics. That last is very important—stock brokers, for example, are governed not by themselves but externally by the government, and are not therefore professionals. An structural engineer is an applied scientist, and hence not a professional in spite of “professional” licensing requirements; likewise an architect is an artist and an accountant a tradesman. And so forth.
I use it much more generally as an adjective, witnesseth whereof the organization Paul Guyot and I founded several years ago, the Professional Hack Authors RecogniTion Society, or PHARTS. We hacks are tradesmen pretending to be artists.
Supposedly there was a Texan who was U.S. Ambassador to a South American country in the 1960’s. His hotel suite was vandalized with graffiti saying “Yankee Go Home.” His host tried to apologize but the Ambassador quipped “Shucks, we don’t like ’em where I’m from either!”
I’m late commenting here, but I’m interested in the term professional as applied to writers. When can a writer call him/herself a pro? The most lenient definition would be anybody who has been paid for a piece of writing. The strictest would be a person who makes his/her living entirely by writing. Most of us (me included) would fall somewhere in the middle: longtime paid writer but always had a day job.