A dream this morning formed a metaphor.
I had finished one piece of a courseware project … [this is true, not a metaphor] … and told the maid to send out the result. [THE MAID? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? I’VE NEVER HAD A MAID!] Later I checked the mailbox and saw that the maid had placed the finished manuscript in an envelope but forgot to stamp it. [Dreams haven’t yet switched to online thinking.] She had also enclosed all of the materials and objects I was using or thinking about while developing the piece, including an abacus and several electronic gadgets.
.
The maid is mysterious but the envelope isn’t. Before sleep I was remembering my bookkeeping years, when I used to take the weekly deposit to the bank and place it in the night deposit box. The bank supplied a zippered cloth pouch, and you filled the pouch with the cash, coins, checks, deposit slips and other documents needed for the deposit. You opened the chute and tossed the whole pouch in, then opened another drawer and picked up an empty pouch for the next deposit.
The package also reflects an etymology in the wonderful book I’m reading right now. Author Sherri Olson analyzed court documents from two English villages in the 1300s and told how the peasants really lived.
The book’s Big Theme: Peasants had far more autonomy, far more money, and far more power than we were taught in school. I already knew that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING we read in school is poisonous lies formed by our sweatshop masters, so I bought the book to fill out the real picture. It turns out that the real picture resonates with the brain networks I’m narrating for courseware. Peasant life was based on current relationships with constant two-way negotiations, just as our understanding of life is based on current relationships with constant negotiation. So the book also belongs in the envelope.
Etymology: Most dictionaries mention the still-current phrase job of work but treat job as an onomatopoeic term for a small object, like glob or bob or buck. Olson fills in the correct origin. Work was measured by the piece or package, which could be treated fungibly as money or work or animals or grain. Each peasant was expected to perform certain tasks for the village, like taxes or rent. The court documents (mostly in Latin, which most peasants understood and read) enumerated the animals or units of work or money in each transaction. One unit of work was written as i opus since all numbers were lowercase roman form. i opus was generally abbreviated as i op, and j in those days was solely a word-final form of i. 3 was iij, 12 was xij and one was just j. So one work-coin was j op which eventually got pronounced as a word after j had hardened into a palatal voiced fricative. The old unit is also preserved in job lot, jobber, and the auto industry practice of counting each car on the assembly line as one job. In printing a job is one unique order (eg 1000 invoices or 200 engraved invitations) with unique specifications of text and font and paper. A job press is designed to handle small orders, and a job shop specializes in doing them. (A newspaper or book is not a job.)
The book also pulls me back to my earlier focus on noun and verb forms as a reflection of social arrangements. The peasants agree with our brain in treating each end of a relationship as a separate region in the brain and a separate form of the word. Earlier I noticed that languages with complex noun cases were less susceptible to Sorosian corruption because they hadn’t already been corrupted by the sweatshoppers. Modern western languages (French, English, Spanish, German) have lost noun endings except for a few remaining on pronouns. Russia, where medieval arrangements were simply rebranded as Soviet arrangements, retains almost all of the Indo-European noun cases.
The sweatshoppers, assisted in politics by the “rights” mongers, destroyed the two-way obligations and interactive negotiations of earlier times and languages, which were created by our own living brain. In the post-1700 world the owner has all the “rights” and no obligations. Schools tell us that peasants had no power and no money and no autonomy so we can feel “free” and “democratic” in contrast to the en-Slav-ed Russians and “communist” “red” Chinese.
The current Return To Work movement is a rehash of 1700. Trump’s 2020 torture camp ACCIDENTALLY enabled most people to rediscover the natural resonance of Natural Law work arrangements. Elon and his Scroogish cohorts HATE to see peasants rediscovering life, so they require peasants to be in the sweatshop 24/7 where Unsleeping Elon can watch them like a hawk. Elon already implemented RTW in his existing Xompanies. Now that he has LBO’d the former startup USA and magically transformed it into USX, he’s imposing the same unnatural tyranny on his wholly owned USX employees.
= = = = =
Footnote: Apparently banks are still using pouches. These look the same, except that ours didn’t have locks. The chute and drawer weren’t locked either. Couldn’t happen now, especially after the Bush tyranny placed idiotic controls on deposits “to halt IslamoRadicalTerrorist money laundering.” Back then the empty pouches were available for anyone to grab, but nobody grabbed them BECAUSE WE FELT TRUSTED. When you assume people are responsible, they are. When you assume people are Security Risks, they are.
Polistra's Mill 