What would it look like to crack “work” into a list of more precise words?<p>A lack of words has practical consequences. Our words create our perception of the world. To take just one example, many countries have instituted a 40-hour “work” week. Imagine if we had specific words. Would we have a 60-hour “speerk” week and a 20-hour “merk” week?<p>Speerk: Requiring body movement and relatively low frontal-lobe function. Waiters, cooks (in their day-to-day cooking) and farm laborers engage in speerk. While physically exhausting, the energy of movement enables you, in my experience, to speerk much longer hours than merking (see below for definition). Speerk combines speed and work.<p>Abstrerk - An architect might engage in abstrerk: picturing abstract problems, how to organize a building. A software developer who isn’t coding at the moment - but instead architecting a complex IT system is also abstrerking. An interior designer might abstrerk about how a space could be organized in a new way.