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OnWords: Industry

One word you hear less and less is “industry.”

Associated with images of smokestacks belching out plumes of chemicals and the Cuyahoga river on fire, maybe that's understandable. 

In the 1960s, the comedy troupe Firesign Theater satirized presidential candidates by having a candidate call, absurdly, for “Shoes for Industry!”

Maybe they were signaling the beginning of the decline of industry as a buzzword: the next three decades would see a massive shift away from an America that made things and toward one focused on selling. 

Many American companies now make things overseas, and the less we engage in industry, the less power the word has as a source of identification and pride. 

Even a derivation like “industrious,” which once implied the kind of diligence even bluebloods could appreciate, has largely disappeared from common use. “Industrious” has been replaced by terms like “hard working” and “self-starter”--terms that could apply to a lot of different kinds of labor, whether material objects are actually being built or not. 

But the ghosts of industry haunt us still in attempts to objectively measure work that's essentially immeasurable. 

Evaluation scores of how effective a teacher really is or the friendliness of a customer service agent assume that all work is basically the same as building widgets, that everything from art to therapy can be standardized and made more efficient. 

“Industry,” then, is a word about which we are in denial: it's still with us, even if it's no longer on our lips.

Lael Ewy is a co-founder and editor of EastWesterly Review, a journal of literary satire at www.postmodernvillage.com, and a writer whose work has appeared in such venues as Denver Quarterly and New Orleans Review and has been anthologized in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.