But the Protestants endowed work with the quest for meaning, identity and signs of salvation. The notion of work as something beyond mere labor, as work-plus, indeed as a calling, highlighted its personal and existential qualities. Work became a kind of prayer. More than a means of living, it became a purpose for living. Along the way, she quotes thinkers including Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx.
Work is serious and play is nonserious.
Playing Monopoly with someone who takes notes, and counts every move you make, and never cracks a smile might feel like work. Working with people who play practical jokes on one another and come to work wearing propeller beanies and toting squirt guns might feel like play. While 'labor' implies physical exertion, 'toil' denotes continuous and exhausting labor, and 'drudgery' refers to work that we dislike because of its minuteness or dull uniformity. Compared to words like 'labor' and 'toil,' the word 'job' sounds almost cheerful. While many of us may associate slavery only with African men and women being shipped to the Americas, Ciulla notes that more than half the early white settlers outside New England came to the New World as indentured servants or redemptioners.