opinionated article - occupation

Don’t be a bore at the dinner table!

Should we be bringing the work language into the household? It is a different environment to working facilities and shouldn’t be brought back as the people around you wouldn’t know what it is about unless they do the same job.

When your family member or friends talk about their day at work, most people are interested as they care about them and how they are getting on at work- whether they have had a bad day or not. The amount of conversation between the two (or more) people can be small talk ranging from a conversation about the whole day, start to finish. This is ok, right? This is normal. But when you drag the terminology from the workplace into an everyday conversation to people who don’t know that much about it, they can lose interest and get lost in the conversation.

In the working environment, people tend to use phatic tokens – research which was done by Labov. The use of self-orientated tokens in the work environment suggests that the conversation has one person with a higher status job title such as making a tool within engineering. They might also use neutral tokens as they both know what they mean within the workplace. This is fine. This doesn’t require any more explaining to people not within that job ad they already know the meaning. However, if you were to explain this jargon to me outside of the work place then I wouldn’t have a clue. Milling, Vernier, height gauge- what’s that?

Some of the tools and equipment which are used in a work environment, such as an engineering company, might have different terminology compared to someone working in a hospital. When at the dinner table discussing their days, people might lose interest in the conversation because they don’t know what they mean themselves. ‘I spent all day making a plumb bob’. Excuse me? What’s that? While on the topic of conversation people might be zoning out the conversation as it might get boring for them because they work in a different environment and are still unsure on what they mean. They might take an interest but not in depth about the whole industry.

However, within the conversation people might use Giles CAT theory which he researched about how spoken language affects your voice within the workplace. Because they might be talking to friends and family about their job, they seem friendlier and comfortable to talk about it. Maybe it’s because they take an interest or just want to find out. Therefore, by them being comfortable they can be open about it. Within your job you can also diverge your language to colleagues- by changing your accent and dialect slightly to suit them. This could also be done to seem like a better teammate. Within work you might also converge as you could be comfortable around them without seeming different to others and not want to be different from the crowd. This way at work everyone can get on better and also have banter as well as being serious for tools and equipment.