Dictionary lists 24,000 occupations

Title

Creator

Townsend, Ed

Identifier

What's that, again?

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XIII (No.7) July 1961

Year

1961

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

What's that, again? DICTIONARY LISTS 24,000 OCCUPATIONS Ed Townsend Suppose someone said to you, “With summer coming •on, I’m headed out to take a job as a zangero.” Or, perhaps, a friend at a Rotary luncheon mentioned spending some time among the flappers in the Northwest. Chances are, you wouldn’t know a zangero from, say, a wrinkle chaser or a joy load er, and you would credit your Rotary friend for a ro mantic streak he might not have—unless you are one of the inveterate book browsers who have found chuckles in the United States Department of Labor’s authoritative, quite serious Dictionary of Occupa tional Titles. The dictionary is a twovolume compendium of 24,000 different jobs in business and industry—jobs that provide a livelihood for 8 out of 10 Ame rican jobholders today. In all, its updated pages now include some 60,000 occupational ti tles and identifications, from archsupport assembler (just what the title implies) to zangero, a supervisor of irri gation ditches. The “flappers” your Rotary friend mentioned could be identified through the diction ary as male copper workers, not lively lassies in the shortskirted styles of 1961. A wrinkle chaser? He works in a boot and shoe factory to make sure your shoe body is smooth, completely wrinkle free. The joy loader has a coal-mine job. To the men involved, they are just jobs leading to week ly Pay checks. But there is little prosaic about such job names as bushing and bungboring-machine operator, a ti tle with a lilt, or stiff-leg der rick operator, or pulpit man in a steel mill. July 1961 33 The keep-off girl searches insurance reports for suspi cious losses; she may be a friendly lass with a comehither look despite her job. A gandy dancer may be all muscles and no grace; he lays and repairs railroad tracks. A boarder shapes and removes wrinkles from nylon stock ings. A tipper dresses poul try. A chamberman is not a male chambermaid; he makes sulfuric acid. And a pretzel peeler doesn’t do what the ti tle suggests, but places raw pretzels on a conveyor belt. Never confuse a donkey doctor with a veterinarian; he repairs donkey engines for the logging industry. A banking inspector would be lost in the bookkeeping departments of a financial house; his job in volves the inspection of parts of watches. And a leg inspec tor only eyes empty hose in a stocking factory. The dictionary recognizes many workers whose jobs might never be thought of otherwise: the cracker stack ers, doll-eye setters, baseball glove stuff ers, back-pocket attachers, bologna lacers, fan mail clerks, and ribbon tiers who make the little red bows on Valentines. Other classifications catch the eyes — and imaginations: k n e e-pants operators, bag holders, bottom men, plodder men, moochers, leachers, bum pers, knockers, neck cutters, on-and-off men, dieing-out machine operators, first fal lers, and former men. But, there are also listings for backer-up, and build-up men. Some new jobs are showing up. One is sage engineer, not necessarily a wise man as the title would suggest but cer tainly one with a background of technical training. He is a product of the alphabet age: sage is an abbreviation of semiautomatic ground equip ment, and the sage engineer is a specialist who might be found working as an experi mental rocket-sled mechanic or an electric-eye sorting ma chine technician. There are other listings that are in keeping with changed times. One is the au tomobile self-service station attendant, another the laun derette attendant. The newly listed security officer’s job is a result of in ternational and industrial cold wars. The Labor Department up dates the dictionary periodi cally, and it is widely used in industrial relations bv em ployers and union represen tatives who deal with them. One value is to give some uniformity to job descrip 34 Panorama tions and titles, so that fair comparisons may be made. But, complete as it is, the dictionary doesn’t list all jobs. A writer for a labor news paper recently pointed out that the latest dictionary missed such off-beat jobs as the lost-kid finder, a carnival employee whose job involves watching the children wan dering around fairgrounds and carnival sites and round ing up the strays; the hat agers in Hollywood who make old hats out of new ones by an adroit rumbling—and why not old ones in the first place? — and “listen-to” specialists who help those with prob lems by letting them talk them out, at $3 an hour. Those may never make the dictionary; its purpose, after all, is serious and its direction is toward industrial-relations specialists. However, other jobs are nudging their way into the listings year by year. It’s likely that the stick man will make the grade in the next updating. If you don’t know him, he is the at tendant who is charged with keeping others away from a welder working on a subway third rail. BIRTH The little girl in the zoological park tossed bits of a bun to the stork, which gobbled them greedi ly, and bobbed its head toward her for more. “What kind of a bird is it, mamma?” the child asked. The mother read the placard, and answered that it was a stork. “O-o-o-h!" the little girl cried, as her eyes rounded. “Of course, it recognized me!” July 1961 35

pages

33+

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