time to rid ourselves
notion leisure for workmen
a class privilege

Based on the article, The weekend is 100 years old – but have ‘skiveday Fridays’ and hybrid working ruined it for everyone? by Jess Cartner-Morley.

Ms. Cartner-Morley writes, “In 1926, Henry Ford gave his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off – and the two-day chunk of time to party, pray or simply do nothing was born. Now it’s changed beyond recognition.”

“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. “People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,” he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US.

And it got me to thinking about the term Weekend … or Week End as it floated around in my brain.

I came up with a scene from the show Downton Abby where new heir to the title said he might be able to come out from the city to Downton … for the Week End.

Ms. Cartner-Morley remembered the same scene and commented, “The late, great Maggie Smith had, as she so often did, the best line. “What is a weekend?” she asked, in Downton Abbey, with the entitled bewilderment of a dowager countess for whom income is spoonfed in silver from birth, not doled out in a brown envelope on a Friday night.”

The problem is that scene in the TV show took place in the first season, the year the Titanic sank, 1912.

Maybe that’s where Mr. Ford got the idea?

everywhere nowhere
jactatively away
like the falling tide

Adapted from the poem, Words in a Certain Appropriate Mode” by Hayden Carruth as published in Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991 (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, Wash, 1992).

Aside from the many moods captured in the poem that match many of my current moods,

Nor not alone, where cognition seeps
Jactatively away like the falling tide

If there were a tide, and what is left
Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps
Its undifferentiated unreality, all

It was that word there, Jactatively.

Was it made up?

Is it really a word?

Was gratified to find it is indeed a word.

And what a word!

According to the Online Merriam-Webster, Jactatively is an adverb derived from the rare word jactative (pertaining to boasting or the restless tossing of the body), meaning in a manner characterized by bragging, ostentatious false claims, or restless physical agitation.

In the 17th century, lawyers began tossing around the word jactitation, which can be traced back to the Latin verb jactare, meaning “to throw.” Originally, jactitation was used as a word for a false claim or assertion being publicly thrown about to the detriment of another person. Run-of-the-mill slander and false claims of being married to someone were two common types of jactitation brought to court. Before long, jactitation had jumped over to the medical profession, where it continues to serve as a word for restless, jerky, or twitchy body movements. In 1761, British writer Laurence Sterne threw jactitation into his novel Tristram Shandy as a substitute for discussion, but that meaning never caught on.

Restless physical agitation.

BOY HOWDY!

All I have to do is turn off the light and lay down yet my mind jactatively refuses to release me to sleep.

Here is the poem.

It is not music, though one has tried music.
It is not nature, though one has tried
The rose, the bluebird, and the bear.
It is not death, though one has often died.

None of these things is there.

In the everywhere that is nowhere
Neither the inside nor the outside
Neither east nor west nor down nor up
Where the loving smile vanishes, vanishes
In the evanescence from a coffee cup
Where the song crumbles in monotone
Neither harmonious nor inharmonious
Where one is neither alone
Nor not alone, where cognition seeps
Jactatively away like the falling tide
If there were a tide, and what is left
Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps
Its undifferentiated unreality, all
Being neither given nor bereft
Where there is neither breath nor air
The place without locality, the locality

With neither extension nor intention
But there in the weightless fall
Between all opposites to the ground
That is not a ground, surrounding
All unities, without grief, without care
Without leaf or star or water or stone
Without light, without sound
anywhere, anywhere . . .