turk
v.— «For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves “turkers,” do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace.…Curtis Taylor, 50, a corporate trainer in Clarksville, Ind., who has earned more than $345 on Mturk.com, doesn’t even think of turking as work.…He doesn’t like to watch TV much, and says that turking beats playing free online poker.…Eric Cranston, 18, who recently graduated from high school, got into turking because at the time he didn’t have anything better to do.» —“I make $1.45 a week and I love it” by Katharine Mieszkowski Salon July 24, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...