A Real Piece of Work

We heard from Pamela Poon in Bozeman, Montana, who wanted to know about the phrase, a piece of work.

She says that she understands it to mean a pain in the rear.

For example, if you and your friends are discussing your local elected official, she writes, instead of openly criticizing her, you might say, I saw Mary and we discussed the new zoning amendment. And, well, all I can say is that she’s a real piece of work.

And so Pam wants to know if she’s using that correctly.

A real piece of work?

Yeah.

Yes, she is.

That’s a great definition for it.

In fact, Merriam-Webster has a definition I like a lot. A complicated, difficult, or eccentric person.

So it’s somebody who is not quite normal for whatever reason and probably disagrees with you.

We think, and I say we meaning the body of people who research language, we think that it comes from Hamlet, from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

There is a scene in there where, if you remember, Hamlet is kind of dissatisfied with life.

So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to him to kind of cheer him up.

And he’s explaining to them, despite the fact that humans are these amazing things, and he says, what a piece of work is a man.

How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.

Even though he thinks all these great things, he still can’t take delight in them.

And so he’s kind of using it literally to mean we are a great piece of work.

But it is believed that that piece of work is then borrowed by people who are literate and well-read and that sort of thing.

It’s kind of an allusion to this.

Even though you are an amazing living human being and you’re an awesome creature, you’re still disappointing me in some way.

That’s great. I didn’t realize there was a connection.

That’s the best guess that we have. It’s a great one.

But by the 1920s, it was well-entrenched in slang.

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