The Weekend

Words are important. Language is not just a medium, like a water pipe, it is a reflection of how we think. We use words not only to describe objects but also to express ideas, and the introduction of words into the language marks the simultaneous introduction of ideas into the consciousness. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Giving names to objects consists in moving immediate, unreflected, perhaps ignored events on to the plane of reflection and of the objective mind.” Take a word like “weekend,” which originated at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike the medieval “weekday” that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord’s Day, the profane “weekend” – which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed – came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure.

[Witold Rybczynski, Home (Penguin, 1986), chapter two (“Intimacy and Privacy”), pp. 20-21]