Gig, as in a Short-Term Job

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Chris and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hey, Chris, we’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind today?

I’m a musician. I’m a professional musician. I’ve been my entire life. Been everywhere, like all over the world. And of course, I love for languages from meeting so many different people.

My question is, where are the origins? Because as you know, as shorthand, we say when we have a job, we say we have a gig. So, and I hear it more often now, like you hear the term like gig economy, and I’m just kind of wondering like where it came from. And yeah, just pretty much anything you know about the word. And where have you heard gig around the world?

I’ve heard full-on French speakers say gig when they’re talking about going to play a show. I’ve heard it in China. I’ve heard it. It’s in the UK for sure. And, of course, here in the United States, in every part of the United States, from Las Vegas where I used to live, New York City where I have friends who work there, L.A., and down here in Texas, we all say the word gig when we’re going to go do a show.

Yeah, it’s the established word for doing musical engagement, right?

Correct, yes. Yeah. And then from music, it branched out to doing any kind of short-term engagement outside of music. So let’s say a gig is a computer technology expert, which is what I used to do. I used to call them IT gigs, where I was doing a short term couple weeks as a fill-in IT expert, you know, fixing somebody’s computer setup.

But the gig economy actually is a relatively new expression. That two-word expression was coined by Tina Brown, the editor. But in 2009, it’s relatively new. So that’s actually a new expression. But gig, referring to a short-term engagement, originally did start out in music. But before that, we’re not really sure where it comes from.

There are a lot of unexplained histories of different terms that are gig-related and spelled gig and kind of sound like gig. The history of the word is often confused with a lot of other words that are spelled or pronounced the same or similar. But most likely they’re coincidences because simple words tend to be reinvented or reappear in a language. So it’s pretty easy to twist meanings until they resemble each other. So we’re not really sure where it comes from before that.

It’s possible it’s even related to the word jig. We just don’t know. Or the French words related to a type of dance or a type of music. We just don’t know. It’s all very rather confusing. But yeah, there is a supposedly people credit UB Blank, who was a jazzman with the word gig related to music from 1920s. But there’s a high chance that it’s older than that.

Yeah, that makes sense. Wow, okay. Yeah. So it doesn’t come from music or did I misunderstand that part?

That’s what I was saying earlier. It’s very unclear. There’s a really strong chance. So what happened was music made it well-known, and then it branched out from there, but it’s not clear in the early days whether or not music was the sole source of the term.

Gotcha. Okay. It’s hard to know. Slang is like that, you know? Slang is always very hard to track down into early days. It’s often transmitted orally and doesn’t show up in print until it’s more well-established.

Well, I’m glad that you spent a few minutes with us, Chris. Really appreciate it. This is a dream come true. I love you guys. I love the show. And share some more musician language with us. We love that stuff.

Oh, I’ve got more, yeah. I’m starting to write them down now. So, yeah, I’ll definitely reach out to you guys again.

Excellent. We look forward to that. All right. Be well. Thank you all. Take care, Chris. Thank you. You as well. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Share the language of your profession or hobby. You can email us, words@waywordradio.org. And you can reach us from anywhere in the world. Just go to waywordradio.org/contact.