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Lance article writing11/12/2023 I poured myself a coffee, settled down at my desk and entered the wordsfree lance, free-lance, and freelance. It can compare and chart the use and frequency of relevant words over hundreds of years, in relation to the books in the database. It is essentially a virtual card catalog, but the coolest part of the whole project is the Ngram viewer. The Library Project by Google was created to let anybody search through old, rare and out-of-print books while protecting the rights of publishers and authors. Over at Google Books you can use their Ngram viewer to search the massive database of books they have compiled. I felt the nagging tug of unanswered questions so I pulled out my digital shovel and got to work. Although Wikipedia is a shining example of crowd sourcing and coworking, and is generally a reliable source for questions of this sort, something didn’t feel right. The curious thing though, is that most people claiming Ivanhoe as the first use of the term, merely cited the Wikipedia entry for the word freelance. He writes, “I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them-I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.” The meaning here is simple and self-explanatory A mercenary solider offers his work and his weapons to the highest bidder. How long has the term freelance been used to indicate someone who sells his or her work or projects on an individual basis and is not beholden to one particular boss?Ī quick scan of the internet reveals many brief articles about the origin of the word freelance and all seem to be in agreement that the first use of the word in print comes from the book Ivanhoe written by Sir Walter Scott in 1819. (If the idea of writing in a coworking space sounds good, see the Deskmag article about just that). Six months before, Sippy had been a cheery cove, full of happy laughter, but at that time he was what they call a free-lance, bunging in a short story here and a set of verses there and generally enjoying himself.” Wodehouse was referring to a writer who makes a joyful living as a freelancer before turning to what we would consider a more structured position as a salaried editor. “All these editor blokes, I understand, get pretty careworn after they’ve been at the job for awhile. In a story titled The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy, written in 1930, Wodehouse gives us a peek into the idea of a freelancer nearly eighty-five years ago. What could be the origin of the word so widely used today, yet seemingly so different from its literal meaning? Wodehouse, when the wordfree-lance (with a hyphen), leapt off the page and into my wandering mind. So it was no surprise, as I was reading a book of short stories from P.G. Given that I’ve only known freelance work for the past ten years, one could rightly argue that my mind is already set to that default.
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