Brian from Cincinnati, Ohio, asks about voluntold, a workplace verb for being assigned a task under the polite cover of “volunteering.” The formation neatly blends volunteer with told. At his nonprofit camp, it describes duties like fundraisers that someone else has effectively signed you up for. The term is especially associated with military slang, where a superior may call for “volunteers” and then simply pick the non-volunteering people who will do the job. Printed evidence is relatively recent. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Voluntold at Work, from Fundraisers to the Marines”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Brian Pollack from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Yay, Cincinnati! Hi!
Hi.
What’s going on, Cincinnati?
Well, I have a question about a word I’ve heard at work a couple times, and the word is voluntold.
Voluntold, how are you spelling that?
V-O-L-U-N-T-O-L-D.
Okay.
And it’s used kind of exactly the same way as the word volunteered, but it would be used, for instance, if you just say, if someone was at a fundraiser event and you’d say, oh, I didn’t know you were going to be here, and you’d say, oh, my boss voluntold me.
Nice.
Right, right.
Nice.
Where do you work that you hear that?
I work at a camp. It’s a nonprofit camp. And so there’s a lot of things where we are volunteered to do fundraisers and things like that. But my suspicion is actually that it’s probably a military word. I was wondering if I was on the right track.
Yes, definitely.
When I think of this expression, I think of the commanding officer in front of his troops going, I need three volunteers to clean up the nuclear waste. You, you, and you. And the thing is, there’s no hand raising there. He’s just picking three people and that’s that.
Right? That’s what we’re talking about?
Right.
Because when you do volunteer work for a not-for-profit, you still have a boss. There is still somebody telling you what to do. And there’s a certain kind of patina of politeness there that maybe you wouldn’t encounter in a normal workplace. But somebody’s telling you what to do. So you are actually being voluntold.
That’s hilarious.
So is that military originally?
Yeah.
As far as I know, it is. It’s very common in the Marines. The earliest use that I know of is from 1996, which is way too recent. I’m betting it’s from at least the 60s. But there’s no way to prove that. I haven’t seen it in print any earlier than that, though.
All right.
Well, Marines make sense. There are a couple of Marines that work at the camp that I work at, and those are the guys I heard first using the term.
Aha.
There we go.
Aha.
Well, nice. That came together, didn’t it?
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
Well, thanks for your call, Brian Besson. What kind of camp is this? Is this for kids or summer camp?
Yeah.
It’s an outdoor education camp and a summer camp. It’s actually a YMCA summer camp and outdoor education.
You teach the city kids not to be afraid of bears?
Pretty much, yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks for your call, Brian. Have a great summer.
Yep, you too.
Thanks a lot.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye.
Voluntold.
Voluntold, you know. I love that. There’s no end to the sack of slang that the soldiers bring to the language.
None at all.
That sack of slang. I love that. And they keep churning it out, you know.
Yeah.
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