office wife
n.— «Then there is the “office wife” role that the woman behind the typewriter or the data machine or the steno pad is somehow expected to perform…duties that never appear on a job description. A secretary must be a waitress, they say, who serves coffee and snacks to the boss; a personal shopper, who buys birthday presents for the wife; a nurse, who administers his eyedrops; a maid, who tends plants and dusts.» —“Secretaries See Parallels In ‘Nine To Five’” by Georgia Dullea New York Times Jan. 2, 1981. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...