Hot air

Hot air rises.

I heard this true fact on the weather channel as a description why things are just soaking wet around here lately. It seems that hot air from the gulf coast has collided with colder northern air, and climbed creating turbulence, thunderstorms, and a generally crappy tone to the weather. I was thinking about that yesterday, as Mike Sanders proposed:

The most accepted definition of professional is getting paid to do something, whether it be writing, journalism or sports. But as with most things the line gets fuzzy at the edges.

It’s only natural that someone would seek to support themselves using the skills that they have, but I’ve always had a natural disdain for the term “professional” because of the way that this economic motive colors things. “Professional photographer” usually means creating advertising propaganda, taking pictures of babies or weddings, staging portraits of those affluent enough to pay for the service, etc. This contrasts with the amateur, who does it for the sheer love of pictures. When people called me a professional, I usually took it as an insult.

So I began to wonder about the genesis of this term, and the negative turbulence that it creates in me. I took a quick glance at my Shorter Oxford this morning and noted that the opposition of professional to amateur is a late 19th century one, so it’s not always been there. Mike asked a very good question:

Is getting paid the most relevant definition of professional? Why is that? Will it change in the age of the Internet?

I decided to take advantage of my new at-home access to the full OED online to see if I could find other possibilities for the term. The oldest definition was this:

A. adj. I. 1. Pertaining to or marking entrance into a religious order. Obs. rare.

c1420 St. Etheldred 797 in Horstm. Altengl. Leg. (1881) 300 Hit was hurre professhennalle rynge. [Cf. profession-ring in PROFESSION 9.]

Makes it sound kind of cultish, now doesn’t it? But it preserves the fervor which we commonly apply to the term, without the negative opposition to amateur, because who would enter a religious order without some love for it? Yeah, I know some skeptics would argue otherwise. The clergy was indeed a way of supporting oneself for long periods in history, so perhaps this doesn’t entirely remove the stigma of filthy lucre. There is a certain reticence beneath some of the examples cited in the second definition:

II. 2. Pertaining to, proper to, or connected with a or one's profession or calling.

1747-8 RICHARDSON Clarissa (J.), Professional, as well as national, reflections are to be avoided. 1838 DICKENS Nich. Nick. xiv, I dislike doing anything professional in private parties. 1849 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. iii. I. 332 It was in these rustic priests,..who had not the smallest chance of ever attaining high professional honours, that the professional spirit was strongest. 1870 LOWELL Study Wind. 408 As perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker.

I think this one catches the contradictory spirit in more modern usage. Macaulay preserves the religious sense, with the notation that reward is not necessarily tied to a sense of professionalism, while Lowell notes the disingenuous sense of the term. Perhaps though, the closest connection to the rise of the term itself is the rise of the middle class:

3. Engaged in one of the learned or skilled professions, or in a calling considered socially superior to a trade or handicraft. professional (middle) class, members of the learned and skilled professions regarded collectively.

1793 SMEATON Edystone L. 73 Called upon, not only as a professional man, but as a man of veracity. 1871 M. E. BRADDON Zoophyte's Rev. iii, Sometimes there was a party, consisting of professional people..with a sprinkling of the smaller county gentry. 1888 BESANT 50 Years Ago xix. 262 There has been a great upward movement of the professional class. 1979 G. ST. AUBYN Edward VII i. 29 Gibbs had been brought up as a member of the professional Middle Class.

So there you have it: social superiority. An upward movement, like a stream of hot air. It generates rain. It’s only when you get to the fourth definition that you get to the money part:

4. a. That follows an occupation as his (or her) profession, life-work, or means of livelihood, as a professional soldier, musician, or lecturer; spec. applied to one who follows, by way of profession or business, an occupation generally engaged in as a pastime; hence used in contrast with amateur, as professional cricketer. Disparagingly applied to one who ‘makes a trade’ of anything that is properly pursued from higher motives, as a professional politician.

The fifth definition reverts back to the rising hot air part again, and the sixth hits close to where I’m headed:

5. That is trained and skilled in the theoretic or scientific parts of a trade or occupation, as distinct from its merely mechanical parts; that raises his trade to the dignity of a learned profession.

6. = PROFESSORIAL. Obs. rare.

But then, I’ve always been a bit obscure and rare. However, there’s an interesting subtext to that usage:

b. spec. A prostitute. Cf. PROFESSION 6e.

I suppose since I’ve never been paid for that I can hang on to my amateur status. I may be a slut, but I’m not a whore. Yet, at least. Will the Internet modify the definition of the term? I doubt it; it seems like the term has been dancing on the edge of both positive and negative connotations since its inception. I doubt that the Internet will clear it up in the slightest.

These windy terms like professional get thrown about so much they become meaningless, really. That’s why I had to have a look. Positive uses of the term seem to be relatively rare. Rising hot air creates rain. Rain, as I found out this morning, creates pressure. As I turned the corner to drive on campus, a manhole cover was floating three inches above the pavement, pushed up by the flood of water rushing onto the road from it. A drain must have been clogged somewhere. Sounds like a job for a professional.