Our surnames show the skills we’ve lost
Modern society is in the process of becoming every day more acutely reliant on someone or something else. This is all well and good until it is not.
Surnames supposedly have four origins. Firstly, there is those of the patronymic variety: Robertson, Peterson et cetera. Then there are those related to the place someone lived: for example, Mr Green or Mr Wood. In addition are the ones derived from nicknames: White for the pasty ones, Moody for the grumpy. Lastly are those derived from occupation. Smith, Taylor, Fletcher, Cooper, Clarke and many more. The regularity with which you come across each name reflects their former prevalence: after all, each village would have needed its Thatcher, its Wright and its Walker (ie a fuller).
Yet, with the advent of modernity disappeared the variety of traditional trades and occupations. I don’t consider myself a Luddite, but I am grateful that our occupational surnames formed when they did: were we to start today, we’d be lumbered with the tedious job titles of the modern world.
Enter Mr Social Media Manager, or Ms Junior Accounts Manager, or even Mr Class 2 HGV Driver. This is no slur on those doing such jobs, just that “Ms Supply Chain Operative” has less of a ring to it than “Mr Brewer”.
I mention all this because I recently met a twenty-three-year-old butcher. His doing an occupation that was common until the advent of industrial abattoirs (and our subsequent utter disassociation with how food gets on to our plates) seemed quaintly eccentric, almost like someone professing an interest in alchemy. Indeed, being a young butcher today is, outside of butchering circles, a peculiarity. Most skilled professions have become similarly untypical, particular after many have been funnelled into the university meat-grinder that has thoroughly distorted the lives of the nation’s young.
Instead of working with our hands, modern society demands we vegetate behind computer screens or answering telephone calls in a wearisome cycle of modern corporate monotony. No wonder we are all so fat and so depressed. Little surprise still that men, whose inner spear-wielding caveman is suppressed under the weight of Zoom meetings and Key Performance Indicators, find their sperm counts falling and moobs expanding.
Perhaps this is just the dissatisfied cry of someone who never could quite gel with the corporate game, desperately trying to find legitimisation for his own shortcomings. But then when the proverbial hits the fan – as it has in the past – the cost of our flight away from actual skills into the ephemera of the modern world will be all to clear to see.
By the day we become more reliant on others for the most basic things. Few, apart from my friend, know how to cut up an animal should they have to. Hardly any young people know the basics of maintaining a car. But not only that: the skills are increasingly hyper-clustered into smaller groups, as economies of scale and technological advances move once understandable skills beyond our ken.
Modern society is in the process of becoming every day more acutely reliant on someone or something else. This is all well and good until it is not. As the world’s current disquiet has shown us so quickly: systems and organisational patterns can fall apart at lightning pace.
If they were to again, would you rather be stuck with Mr Butcher or Mr Social Media Manager? Unfortunately, the odds are that you’ll be lumbered with the latter.
And I won’t be much help, either.
