In North America today is Labor Day. In most other western countries the day set aside for “the working man” is May 1st. The reason it’s the first Monday in September for Americans and Canadians is that in 1882 there was a big parade for improved labor laws in New York City on the first Monday in September. In the following years protests didn’t remain as parades and there were riots and strikes. Wikipedia says that President Grover Cleveland didn’t want Labor Day to stand as a celebratory reminder of those conflicts, some notable examples of which had happened in May, and so he sided with the New York crowd who were pushing for their traditional parade date.

As a word labor was one of those that arrived with William the Conqueror and first pops up in the English written record in 1300. Of course before that it had been Latin laborem. It’s meaing at first in English appears to have mirrored the French and Latin forerunners, being “work,” “exertion” or “trouble.” The only source I see that tries to trace the word origin further back than that is Etymonline where it says that the word might originally have meant “tottering under a burden,” and that it might be related to another word labere “to totter.”

It wasn’t until Shakespeare’s time about 400 years ago that we find examples of the birthing process being called labor. That first citation was in a poem by a guy named Edmund Spenser who just happens to be the guy who wrote a rather famous poem The Faerie Queen. I get mixed messages on this Spenser guy because one report I see tells me that he had an estate while another says he was very poor.

Whatever the case, in a time before x-box and Hollywood poetry had a bigger place in the cultural landscape and The Faerie Queen was such a big hit that Edmund Spenser was brought before Queen Elizabeth for a reading. She thought it was great stuff and told her treasurer to give the guy £100. Now that was a good chunk of change at the time and the treasurer balked at it saying “what, all this for a song?” Elizabeth said that Edmund should be paid what the treasurer thought he was worth then. Since the treasurer didn’t think it was worth much, poor Edmund got paid nothing. But since he was a poet, he wrote another poem.

Time went by and eventually he met the queen again and out came the poem:

I was promised on a time
To have reason for my rhime.
From that time, unto this season,
I received nor rhime, nor reason.

Queen Elizabeth then smacked the treasurer upside the head with a steel pipe—metaphorically anyway—and had him release payment.

This is fittingly within the theme of laborers fighting for fair payment and so I’ll turn now to a division in the word’s meaning between England and North America.

Workers as a group began to be called Labor in the early 1800s and by the end of the century the word was strongly enough entrenched with this meaning that in England a political party took on the name the Labour Party. Now you know that in England labour is spelled with a U while in the United States it has no U. This lucky distinction allowed me to see on Urbandictionary two completely different sets of entries. The entries with the British spelling are 100% concerned with the political party, while the American spelling mentions only work and baby production.

And it seems to me that the entry on labor and childbirth exemplifies the youth of Urbandictionary contributors. Here’s what it says:

Labor: the process of childbirth. It starts with contractions and then the baby pops out. It is NOT a pretty sight. A very painful experience for a mother but if you’re married it’s worth the pain (I guess).

I can’t let that go. Maybe pretty isn’t the word I’d use to describe it, but amazing, thrilling and fantastic are. And I hope your mother thought you were worth the pain.