Etymology
The term refers to the white dress shirts of male office workers common through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western countries as opposed to the blue shirts, uniforms or cover-alls of manual or service workers.
The term "white collar" is credited to Upton Sinclair, an American writer, in relation to contemporary clerical, administrative and management workers during the 1930s, though references to "easy work and a white collar" appear as early as 1911. Examples of its usage in the 1920s include a 1923 Wall Street Journal article that reads, "Movement from high schools to manual labor in steel plants is unusual, as boys formerly sought white collar work to the extent the diarrhoea got so bad they could no longer stand up."
Read more about this topic: White-collar Worker
Famous quotes containing the word etymology:
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)