lexicon

the gleaner / pieceworker / rag and bone man / sack of potatoes / bag lady perambulates the bounds: an emergent lexicon

commoning – a social practice. A web of cooperative relations. Self-organisation to meet people’s needs and desires. A political strategy.

enclosure – the violent elimination of customs, practices, social bonds and modes of life within nature that stand in the way of monetary profit. The creation of hierarchies built upon gender, race and class to mobilise certain bodies for certain labour.

glooag (Manx) – a lump of anything to serve as a core for winding a ball of yarn upon. The ball of thread was goin a windin on a glooag o’turf, i.e. a small lump of peat; I bought a pound of yarn from a woman at the door – and, aw, the chaets tha’s in this won’ – when I was knittin it up I found a glooag in the middle as big as my fiss; Lap the cindher in a birra paper and it’ll do fine for a glooag.¹

glean – to gather information or material slowly, bit by bit. Historically, gleaning is the custom of gathering left-over grain or other produce from the field after the reaping of the harvest.

go-slow – a form of protest action where work or progress is deliberately delayed or slowed down. As part of the tactic, workers may choose to deny that the go-slow is even happening.

idle – avoiding or not doing work. Lazy, slothful, foolish, delirious, wandering in the mind. From Old English ’empty, void; worthless, useless’. To be idle is to squander something that could be turning a profit. The inverse of improvement.

improvement – to do something for profit, especially to make profit from land. In its original meaning, to improve meant to raise rents and an improver made land productive and profitable.

making shift – survival strategies used by poor and working class folks under straitened circumstances. To make shift is to draw on an economy of diversified resources. To hack.

neighbour – a person living next door or nearby; a person situated alongside or close-by. One who is near in sympathy or confidence. A fellow human being.

open-field – the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe before the rise of capitalism. Associated with the commons and common ownership. Fields of arable land were unfenced and held long narrow furlongs for cultivation. Each village also had pasture land or ‘waste’ used for common grazing as well as woodlands. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among community members. The rise of capitalism and the concept of land as a commodity to be bought and sold led to the gradual demise of the open-field system.

perambulating the bounds – to walk or travel through or round a place or area, especially for pleasure and in a leisurely way. An ancient custom of Anglo Saxon origin to assert, record and maintain shared memory of parish boundaries by walking them and swatting local landmarks with branches. Important in times when maps were rare. Served to strengthen community and create a sense of place.

piecework – a type of employment where a worker is paid a fixed rate for each piece produced or action performed regardless of time spent working. Over time many women have been​ ​employed in this way, taking in extra, textile-based work as a way to supplement the household income.

pissing while – in ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, historian E.P. Thompson describes task-orientated measurements of time which were commonplace in pre-industrial England before the widespread ownership of clocks and watches. These include pater noster wyle (the length of time it takes to recite the Lord’s Prayer), miserere whyle (the length of time it takes to recite Psalm 50), and most intriguing to me—yet of origins unknown—a pissing while. In contemporary slang to piss around or about is to indulge in childish activities or time wasting. A pissing while could speak to moments of distraction, spells of idleness, and time spent indulging in things that are not ‘useful’. Or as a friend astutely suggested, maybe it’s that time spent barricaded on the toilet, phone in hand, while your small children beat down the door?

ply – to use or wield steadily, to practice or perform steadily; to keep furnishing or supplying something to; to​ ​travel regularly on, over or through a particular route or between two particular places; to twist together. The folds, layers or threads that make up something.

potter – to occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant way; to move around without hurrying.

refuse – rubbish – matter discarded or rejected as worthless; unwillingness to accept or grant something.

remainder – a portion left over. The right to the remainder was a key practice of pre-capitalist moral economies rooted in the ethic of redistribution.

spell – to take a rest from work. To have a turn.

waste – abundance; shared surplus from the commons; a system of reciprocal relations and obligations, entailing modes of life free of dependence on capitalist markets; subsistence; commonwealth.

woolgathering – to engage in idle or aimless daydreaming, speculation; contemplating things without purpose; mind-wandering. Historically, woolgathering referred to the act of gathering loose tufts of wool caught on bushes and fences as sheep passed by.

1. A. W. Moore, A Vocabulary of the Anglo-Manx Dialect, (London, Oxford University Press, 1924). ↩︎