Job Titles 2

Many companies seem to be making simple job titles more confusing by adding the word ‘operative’. One I often see is ‘cleaning operative’. This seems odd. The point of the suffix ‘-er’ is that it lets us take a verb, like ‘to clean’, and turn it into a noun describing someone who does the action regularly, i.e. ‘cleaner’.

The same applies to the jobs of ‘landscape gardening operative’, ‘building services operative’, ‘welding operative’, ‘postal operative’, and of course, ‘customer service operative’.

Apple has an even better name for its shop staff: ‘genuises’. They are expected to: “be able to take the thorniest questions and answer them in plain old English. Troubleshoot hardware and software. Provide basic customer training. And perform timely repairs.” They do not need to prove the Reimann Hypothesis, beat Gary Kasparov at chess, or cure Aids. ‘Geniuses’ only have to know their way around Apple products, which are designed to be as easy as possible to use anyway.