work – podictionary 125
Jan 7th, 2010 | 
Woody Allen said of his work “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work…I want to achieve it through not dying.”
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The word work has been a part of English pretty well as long as there has been English.
It seems to have had a remarkably stable meaning for more than a thousand years now—or should I say group of meanings, since then, as now we talk about work as the labour, the activity, the resulting product and more.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that this word has Germanic roots which means that it was likely brought cross the English Channel by the Angles and Frisians who arrived in the British Isles sometime after the Romans pulled up stakes in the fifth century.
One thing that is notable about the word work is that way back when, it had an enormous number of spellings and tenses and variations. One of these still comes down to us in wrought iron, meaning “worked iron.”
The word work is dated from 825 but what brought me to this word was a desire to mention the Doomsday Book where work also appeared within a few decades of 1066, when William the Conqueror took the reins of power.
The Doomsday Book has a fame that goes beyond knowledge of what it actually is, or was.
As I hinted, this was a document created at the behest of William the Conqueror after he crossed the English Channel and took over England. He and his relatively small group of Norman fighting men really didn’t have a handle on what it was that they had just won.
They had just booted out the old administration and they needed intelligence on all the details of the realm so they could start taxing and handing out plumb jobs to the folks who had backed their invasion.
Out into the countryside went inspectors who in some cases counted the very barnyard animals in order to assess the value of a place.
The reason the resulting document was called the Doomsday Book—a name that it gained 100 years after—was that whatever the inspector valued your property at, that was that, there was no appeal.
