Soon after my older son began his PhD program, the word colleague appeared in his speech. Prior to this, he had had friends. If he didn’t feel the bond was close enough to refer to someone as a friend, he would look for an alternative (his go-to language is French—he grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium), until, reluctantly, he settled on, acquaintance. Never colleague. Not when he referred to fellow students, teammates on his football (soccer) team, the other campers in Scouts. But once he began his higher education and because it was in the UK, everyone in his circle was a colleague. His mother mentioned it when we were on the phone; she had noticed it, too. He was growing up; this was his first contact with professional working life. Immersed in his program and taking on teaching responsibilities, having a desk in an office space on the campus and being surrounded by people who were neither friends nor acquaintances, this potent brew of new experiences produced this new entry in his personal dictionary—colleague.
It took some time for this to sink in with me. It took hearing it from the next generation to recognize what had transpired over the last decades. I had spent my career in the corporate world; I had referred to those I worked with as colleagues. What took time for me to recognize was how the balance of colleagues and friends in my life had shifted. Since I had never encountered such a sudden and novel experience as my son had by being in a new place with a new language and a new educational and career-aspiring goal, surrounded by new people from diverse backgrounds, I had not faced the temptation of adopting (or overusing) such new-to-me language. The boy didn’t recognize his enthusiasm; he didn’t hear himself speak. But his mother and I did, and we laughed. Everyone was a colleague. He worked now. He had an office. Presumably, he had a water cooler. That is, all the accouterment of the office life, and his language had adjusted accordingly.
But when did this word take on such monumental proportions? Because it’s not just him. Colleague is a common feature in the everyday language of many people. How did it become a fixture in our speech? When I cast my mind back to my parents and their speech patterns, their vocabulary, they never used colleague or words like it. Even though they had both worked for the same company, and shared the same circle of colleagues, they never referred to these people this way. In other words, they didn’t bring the speech pattern, the vocabulary, or the jargon home from work. Since their company was an airline, there was, of course, a lot of shop talk, as they referred to it. And this would have inevitably resembled jargon, but these came in the form of homilies, like “all flap and no throttle,” to refer to someone with a penchant for talking more than acting. Fascinating or endearing words, turns of speech that appealed. But jargon? No. There were no frequently used phrases like, “going forward.” And no one was a colleague. Instead, they were individuals with names, or nicknames, or a label, often a vulgar one, depending on who was being referenced. It was colorful. It had a life of its own. It did not all sound the same.
Today, inside or outside the office, people speak to each other as if they’re in the office. Everyone has become a colleague; no one is a friend (and, often, to refer to someone as “my friend” is to mean the opposite). Few have the interest in having one or becoming one, because no one has the time. Their diaries are already bursting. Going forward, they may have to down-size their number of contacts, update their network.
What does it all mean?
We’ve become the colleague class. It’s a by-product of the corporate class, the current version of what, for most of our history, was the merchant class. Different labels for the same animal. This animal has behaved the same as it always has. Plato described the necessary savagery of the merchant class in The Republic. This is the class of workers engaged in the ruthless and thick-skinned exchange of money and goods, its reputation for barbarous behavior already well-established in Plato’s time. Little has changed. It’s always been a world of friendless transacting, the ground zero for our dog-eat-dog existence. Fast forward to today after, call it, a good dozen decades of Industrial Age and corporatization, the rise of a manager class, Silicon Valley and the celebrity entrepreneur, and we have transformed our society into one consumed by this callous merchant-class-mentality. What was once only a subset of society has become a basic element of our civilization. We’re no longer individuals with names; we’re no longer neighbors and friends but consumers and colleagues. Instead of chatting over the fence or gossiping at the water cooler, we’re exchanging bland jargon among our colleagues, we’re networking to grow our contacts. We’re stripping out all color and life from our relationships. Our contacts, ironically, lack contact to the point of meaninglessness. Closest to us we have, perhaps, only our families, but we find we conduct our conversations with these people in the same work-place language. A word as simple, as bland, as innocuous as colleague proves to be a milestone in our descent from a civil society to a corporate one. No one wants to spend more time in the office, yet everyone takes it home with them and no one recognizes the heavy toll paid.