For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. This glossary playfully explores the etymology and history of hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases, while offering a foundation for a new mode of thinking about work and labor.
The Idler's Glossary
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Joshua Glenn: Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based journalist and scholar. He has labored as a bicycle shop manager and skateboard courier, a busboy and barrel-washer, a researcher and teacher, a handyman and housepainter a bartender and espresso jerk, and also as a magazine and newspaper editor. The only work he has ever done was: publishing Hermenaut, an intellectual zine; contributing regular columns to Feed.com, The Idler (UK), Britannica.com, The London Observer, and The Boston Globe’s Ideas section; and editing Taking Things Seriously, a 2007 collection of essays and photos devoted to oddly significant objects.
Mark Kingwell: After some years of graduate education in Britain and the United States, Mark Kingwell found he had inadvertently perfected a form of idling for which he could get paid. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and has written for publications ranging from Adbusters and the New York Times to the Journal of Philosophy and Auto Racing Digest. Among his twelve books of political and cultural theory are the national best-sellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and Concrete Reveries. In order to secure financing for their continued indulgence he has also written about his various hobbies, including fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art.
Mark Kingwell: After some years of graduate education in Britain and the United States, Mark Kingwell found he had inadvertently perfected a form of idling for which he could get paid. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and has written for publications ranging from Adbusters and the New York Times to the Journal of Philosophy and Auto Racing Digest. Among his twelve books of political and cultural theory are the national best-sellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and Concrete Reveries. In order to secure financing for their continued indulgence he has also written about his various hobbies, including fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Idling!! (Was it ironic that I used exclamation points just then?)
April 22, 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Mark Kingwell's short introduction is why you should get this book.
The rest of the book I don't really get. It's a glossary of terms related to idling. It tries to be clever and amusing, but when you are writing a glossary, you are a bit constrained by how clever and amusing you can be. Again, I don't get it, so instead I'm going to talk about Kingwell's (standard-format, thank you) introduction.
1) One of Kingwell's tasks is to explain that there is a difference between not working and *failing* to work:
"The slacker in effect combines procrastination and boredom into a single experience, under the rubric of evasion. Procrastination, like boredom, involves a stall between first-order desires and second-order desires: both want to want to do something, but find they do not. They are stuck. The difference between them lies only in how they experience this stall, either as a burden of always putting things off (procrastination) or as a burden of not being excited (boredom).
The idler, by contrast, experiences no conflict or stall between desires and desires about those desires. He understands that not working and failing to work are conditions that lie poles apart, and the genius of idling is not its avoidance of work but rather its construction of a value system entirely independent of work."
2) But what exactly does it even mean to "work"?
"The work-ethic condemnation of idleness as unproductive is familiar; it is rooted in the even older notion that morose idleness is sinful, an insult to God's grace. The shared idea in both secular and religious versions of the condemnation is that if one is not engaged in some useful occupation - if one is not working for gain of some sort, whether money or status or progress in the soul's journey - then one is committing a kind of failure: to self, to community, to supreme being, or to all three.
The presuppositions of this view have been comprehensively dismantled by many philosophers by noting just how unfulfilling and stupid most work actually is.
What, after all, is work?
"Work is of two kinds," Bertrand Russell notes: "first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics."
3) I loved this quote. Kingwell called this "the error of all advertising and most culture":
"Contrary to received wisdom, there is no escape from the dismal condition of boredom via further stimulation of desire. Boredom is desire stalled, the "paradoxical wish for a desire" as Adam Phillips has phrased it; the stall is a signal that something has gone wrong with desire, perhaps something big that we need to confront but which under current conditions we cannot."
The rest of the book I don't really get. It's a glossary of terms related to idling. It tries to be clever and amusing, but when you are writing a glossary, you are a bit constrained by how clever and amusing you can be. Again, I don't get it, so instead I'm going to talk about Kingwell's (standard-format, thank you) introduction.
1) One of Kingwell's tasks is to explain that there is a difference between not working and *failing* to work:
"The slacker in effect combines procrastination and boredom into a single experience, under the rubric of evasion. Procrastination, like boredom, involves a stall between first-order desires and second-order desires: both want to want to do something, but find they do not. They are stuck. The difference between them lies only in how they experience this stall, either as a burden of always putting things off (procrastination) or as a burden of not being excited (boredom).
The idler, by contrast, experiences no conflict or stall between desires and desires about those desires. He understands that not working and failing to work are conditions that lie poles apart, and the genius of idling is not its avoidance of work but rather its construction of a value system entirely independent of work."
2) But what exactly does it even mean to "work"?
"The work-ethic condemnation of idleness as unproductive is familiar; it is rooted in the even older notion that morose idleness is sinful, an insult to God's grace. The shared idea in both secular and religious versions of the condemnation is that if one is not engaged in some useful occupation - if one is not working for gain of some sort, whether money or status or progress in the soul's journey - then one is committing a kind of failure: to self, to community, to supreme being, or to all three.
The presuppositions of this view have been comprehensively dismantled by many philosophers by noting just how unfulfilling and stupid most work actually is.
What, after all, is work?
"Work is of two kinds," Bertrand Russell notes: "first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics."
3) I loved this quote. Kingwell called this "the error of all advertising and most culture":
"Contrary to received wisdom, there is no escape from the dismal condition of boredom via further stimulation of desire. Boredom is desire stalled, the "paradoxical wish for a desire" as Adam Phillips has phrased it; the stall is a signal that something has gone wrong with desire, perhaps something big that we need to confront but which under current conditions we cannot."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
People are too busy these days, and people have always been too busy. Except for the idle. Regarded with disdain by most of society, An Idler's Glossary (available for free online as well, if your idleness has left you without $) makes the case, and quite convincingly, that true idlers, not the lazy, and not the slackers, but true idlers are worthy of our respect and deserve to be emulated. You're surrounded by people who work too much. You probably work too much. Why? There is literally no reason. Stop working so much and have a good time. Or spend time with your family. Or your friends. If everyone was an idler everything would be great. Just read this and watch your free time explode. "Oscar Wilde's infamous languidness was just a pose."
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The best part of this little book should not be so; you do not expect and cannot expect that the prologue play that role. It is a thoughtful, deep piece of philosophy, but then, in what should be the core of the book, we have just a row of definitions that are sometimes funny, sometimes deep and many times neither of them. Even so is the kind of book you can revisit from time to time to read ...the prologue.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
Look for Similar Items by Category
- Books > Education & Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Slang & Idioms
- Books > Education & Reference > Encyclopedias > Business
- Books > Education & Reference > Encyclopedias > Humor
- Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Business & Professional
- Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Love, Sex & Marriage
- Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Parodies
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Social Philosophy
