United States or Turkey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The nigger barber, Berry, was one; another was the Jack-of-all-trades, Osterhaut, a kind of municipal odd-man, with the well-known red hair, the face that constantly needed shaving, the blue serge shirt with a scarf for a collar, the suit of canvas in the summer and of Irish frieze in the winter; the pair of hands which were always in his own pocket, never in any one else's; the grey eye, doglike in its mildness, and the long nose which gave him the name of Snorty.
Here we see that even at that early day division of labor had won its way in London, though yet unknown in the country. The jack-of-all-trades, the handyman, who can do everything, gives place to the specialist who confines himself to one thing in which practice makes him perfect. Watt's mission saved him from this, for to succeed he had to be master, not of one process, but of all.
I came here chiefly for the purpose of asking you to let your nephew go with me, as I am in want of a youth to assist me, as a sort of supercargo and Jack-of-all-trades. In fact, I like your nephew much, and have long had my eye on him. I think him the very man for my purpose. I want a companion, too, in my business one who is good at the pen and can turn his hand to anything.
But teaching was not to be his career; indeed, Taylor's versatility for a time threatened to make him the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades: he was employed successively in a grist mill, a saw mill, and an iron foundry; he dabbled in the study of medicine; and finally, in the year which saw Wisconsin admitted to the Union, he bought a farm in that State.
But, although small, it was exceedingly comfortable. Its owner was his own architect and builder, being a jack-of-all-trades, and everything about the wooden edifice betokened the hand of a thorough workman, who cared not for appearance, but was sensitively alive to comfort.
Beside the bar, on a straw mattress, was sleeping a Slavonian pedler of holy images, and a wandering jack-of-all-trades; at the bar the bushy-headed host grinned with doubtful pleasure over such guests, who brought their own eatables and drinkables with them, and only came to show their importance.
You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you lose yourself in it. But at the worst this man is no such poverty-stricken soul as the crank, the tramp, or the jack-of-all-trades.
The shed was therefore comparatively empty. When Philip Maylands came to reside with Solomon, he was allowed to use this shed as a workroom. Phil was by nature a universal genius a Jack-of-all-trades and formed an exception to that rule about being master of none, which is asserted, though not proved, by the proverb, for he became master of more than one trade in the course of his career.
Will you tell me what it is that you have done, the work you were accustomed to do?" "Well, I've been all sorts of things," said Derrick, reluctantly enough. "By profession I'm an engineer, I suppose; but " He paused. "Well, I had a stroke of bad luck in England, and I had to leave it and chuck up my profession. Since then I've been a jack-of-all-trades."
As the reader may easily imagine, our Bible student had been, as well as Spalding, a Jack-of-all-trades, having successively filled the offices of attorney, bar keeper, clerk, merchant, waiter, newspaper editor, preacher, and, finally, a hanger-on about printing-offices, where he could always pick up some little job in the way of proof correcting and so forth.
Word Of The Day