If you are, we have a sister site we support, some of you might recognize them, they are Sawdust Soup.

Head on over and join up, even if your not a pro, and would like to dive into the world of what it takes to go pro, they can help you on your way!

Click on Sawdust Soup!

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, interesting question, john.

I have a hobby I love and we sell some of my projects at craft shows.  Does that me me a professional or a pro????

---

Fred
aka Pop's Shop
www.pops-shop.com
EX-21 (Presently on the floor. Using my 6-year old 788 ! ! ! ! !
'Soooooo many patterns - sooooo little time'

John,

I usta be, wuz won!

Duz dat cownt?

Larry

Old Woodworking Machinery Forum Host

You bet Fred!!!! And if you are interested in seeing how the guys market their products, and display, this is a great site to go surf and see how it all comes together!

Fred Wilson said:

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, interesting question, john.

I have a hobby I love and we sell some of my projects at craft shows.  Does that me me a professional or a pro????

---

Fred
aka Pop's Shop
www.pops-shop.com
EX-21 (Presently on the floor. Using my 6-year old 788 ! ! ! ! !
'Soooooo many patterns - sooooo little time'

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

Larry, they have a pretty good machinery group over there too! Not saying you should leave us and join them! LOL Just sayin is all.

Larry Buskirk said:

John,

I usta be, wuz won!

Duz dat cownt?

Larry

Old Woodworking Machinery Forum Host

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

John,

Who's leaving?

This is Home!

Larry

Old Woodworking Machinery Forum Host

It was a joke, but if I had a smiley to insert you would have know that! Who's idea was it get rid of those smiley's anyways!!!!

Larry Buskirk said:

John,

Who's leaving?

This is Home!

Larry

Old Woodworking Machinery Forum Host

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

I don't know who's idea it was!!!

But now the devil made me do it!!!

Larry

Old Woodworking Machinery Forum Host
John Morris said:

It was a joke, but if I had a smiley to insert you would have know that! Who's idea was it get rid of those smiley's anyways!!!!

Larry Buskirk said:

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

I ain't leavin   

---

Fred
aka Pop's Shop
www.pops-shop.com
EX-21 (Presently on the floor. Using my 6-year old 788 ! ! ! ! !
'Soooooo many patterns - sooooo little time'

We appreciate that Fred!

Fred Wilson said:

I ain't leavin   

---

Fred
aka Pop's Shop
www.pops-shop.com
EX-21 (Presently on the floor. Using my 6-year old 788 ! ! ! ! !
'Soooooo many patterns - sooooo little time'

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

Well  leemeesee:::

I have two professional educations.

I used to be a vocational expert  engineering (engineering is not a profession Thank god)

And I used to be truck driver which is also not a profession  - -thank god.

I used to make custom furniture  with a company called American Reproductions in Boston - which was also not a profession - thank god.

I was also a  shaker on the back of garbage trucks which is also not  a profession  either - thank god.

And I was a skilled trades man Machinist / toolmaker which is definitely not a profession - thank friggin god.

 So that leaves my education Theology.  Yah I was stupid enough to think I wanted to be a minister  from which ridiculous delusion  I finally awoke - thank god.  Can you imagine me a preacher? Mister vulgar irreverent me?   I was bloody good at it,   people  used to ask me to return to their churches frequently to preach, but  I refused ordination when I graduated. 

So that leaves law.  Yah it's supposed to be a profession - or so they told me -  but lawyers don't do much woodwork. Mostly we make people very happy or very angry  (depends on how things come out) or we lead desperately  boring lives doing  real estate and wills trusts & estates.    God save  me from the bozo who wants a real estate closing or a will. I really did like criminal law. Never a dull day: murderers muggers rapists and thieves.

So I suppose I'm a woodworker  who does  other things one of which  is  called a profession.

But don't let the multiple syllables of the  word profession throw you.  It don't mean a bloody thing.  All it means is that the practitioner has given some or all of his life over to some higher calling. It don't mean he's any good at it, or earns a dime doing it, it don't say nuthin' 'bout how he dresses or behaves, it don't even mean  that he has a tiny clue.  It just means he professed to the higher calling - - whatever  the devil that means.

In my definition, professional in the scope of woodwork means one thing, your making money at it. And if that's the case, then Sawdust Soup is a great place to get some good tips on expanded your business or garage shop into a business.

Cliff said:

Well  leemeesee:::

I have two professional educations.

I used to be a vocational expert  engineering (engineering is not a profession Thank god)

And I used to be truck driver which is also not a profession  - -thank god.

I used to make custom furniture  with a company called American Reproductions in Boston - which was also not a profession - thank god.

I was also a  shaker on the back of garbage trucks which is also not  a profession  either - thank god.

And I was a skilled trades man Machinist / toolmaker which is definitely not a profession - thank friggin god.

 So that leaves my education Theology.  Yah I was stupid enough to think I wanted to be a minister  from which ridiculous delusion  I finally awoke - thank god.  Can you imagine me a preacher? Mister vulgar irreverent me?   I was bloody good at it,   people  used to ask me to return to their churches frequently to preach, but  I refused ordination when I graduated. 

So that leaves law.  Yah it's supposed to be a profession - or so they told me -  but lawyers don't do much woodwork. Mostly we make people very happy or very angry  (depends on how things come out) or we lead desperately  boring lives doing  real estate and wills trusts & estates.    God save  me from the bozo who wants a real estate closing or a will. I really did like criminal law. Never a dull day: murderers muggers rapists and thieves.

So I suppose I'm a woodworker  who does  other things one of which  is  called a profession.

But don't let the multiple syllables of the  word profession throw you.  It don't mean a bloody thing.  All it means is that the practitioner has given some or all of his life over to some higher calling. It don't mean he's any good at it, or earns a dime doing it, it don't say nuthin' 'bout how he dresses or behaves, it don't even mean  that he has a tiny clue.  It just means he professed to the higher calling - - whatever  the devil that means.

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

Yah well, you are not alone.  Lots of people use  it that  way, but it is a misuse of the term.  Just as when people use the term instead of "business attire" or "polite behavior."  

Vocation is what you do for a living whether it is Doctor, Lawyer,  Magician,  Basket-weaver, Fletcher,  or whatever.

A Trade is a skilled vocation that you were taught in a guild, an apprenticeship, or  by your elders.

An Avocation is a thing you went to school to learn like Engineering or Accounting

So many people mis-use the word  professional  substituting  it for the perfectly good word vocation that it is commonly used that way by way too many people.  I think they are reaching for some kind of affectation of dignity where there is no need to.  Even dictionaries have picked the error up. It's really a remnant of what happened  culturally in the 1960s in the USA.  It is an affectation that developed as a result  of people feeling insecure about themselves.

In the 1960s We were sending our kids to college for the first time  in most family's histories.  So dad got his hands dirty at the mill sending Johnny to college and they were darn proud of it because little  Johnny was the hope of the family the very first to attend college.  They were moving the family forward.

Then when Johnny matriculated and returned from college he wore white shirts and didn't get his hands dirty and was treated like a Greek god and was paid more in a week than his father earned in a month.   And Johnny was a [fill in the blank high paid job].  He was more than just Johnny.  He was Somebody.

And daddy learned a hard thing. He learned that it hurt to be in the shadow. And before you know it everybody was putting on airs. Everybody was trying to be something.  That was the time in our history  when we as a people went from wanting to do a thing, to  wanting to be a thing. 

So secretaries started calling  themselves Administrative Assistants and Janitors  became  Maintenance Engineers and everybody was looking for new ways to attach the word Engineer to anything they did  using their bodies or hands and the world professional became Howard Cosell's catch phrase for any one who could move a ball from one place to another.  

Before then, if you asked about a person they'd tell you they were somebody's parent or child and maybe where they hailed from, but after that period they started to identify by what it was they did as a vocation.  So now instead of being Johnny's dad  from anytown on Maple Ave the guy is  [fill the line of work and attach some catchy affectation to it] and that's who he thinks he is.   He thinks his vocation is what identifies him to the world.

I see that as a terribly sad thing.

I'd rather get in a fist fight than have some one accuse my Machinist / Toolmaker trade as some kind of profession.  It's like that line from the military "Don't call me SIR~!!  I work for a living. "

Ok Cliff, I'll change the title of the post to "Do You Want to Expand Your Woodworking Business or Start One Up".

I am aware of the whoring out of the word Professional.  It was just a title Cliff! Sheesh! LOL insert smiley here, it's all good man.

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

I am  on a one man crusade for the language.

 It really gets under my skin the way language is slaughtered.

Take Joe Rogan who  announces for MMA fights.  He misuses the word UTILIZE about a thousand times each fight.

Utilize is when you put something to work in a manner in which it was not intended. Use is for when you use it the way it was.  So: "I utilized  my boot heel to drive the tent pegs and then used an axe to chop wood."  But not for  Semi-literate moron Joe.  For him it is all about the extra syllables that he thinks make him sound smarter.  Except they don't, they prove the opposite.

Or that time when  Dr. Elliot  Spitzer during an episode of his failed TV show    was trying to find the word degenerated  and instead came up with the word DEVOLVE as if some how by sheer will power he could make the word mean that the thing he was talking about had De-Evolved which would of course require that it had ever evolved in the first place.  Devolve is used when one government or managerial body transfers power to another.  That's it.  And Doctor Spitzer should have known better.  Oddly once he used the word, it was then bastardized that way by half a dozen talking heads within a week or two because they didn't know what it meant either.  Copy cat morons in the media slaughtering the language.

Another one that gets my skin crawling is the ending of sentences with prepositions.

 The list goes on.

Ya see I'm so bloody darn dyslexic that I had to put in about fifty times the effort that most other people did to get by in school and every where else in life.  I couldn't spell even the simplest of words, grammar gave me apoplexy. Math??  Oh my~!!  I was utterly unable to recall a five digit  sequence long enough to repeat it back to you.  I couldn't add, subtract, multiply, or divide. I could use a calculator to add a series of numbers and do  the calculation any number of times and each time I'd get a different result.  I had to work at things.

One of the results I  have come away with is a certain concern for the language.

Anyway my personal mental issues aside

Please don't make me wear that straight jacket again.

"Do You Want to Expand Your Woodworking Business or Start One Up".

I tried doing that twice.  Miserable utter abysmal failure each time.

Nobody wanted to pay the money it takes to do work by hand.  Nobody wanted to pay  for the  artistry  and craft.  I'd get angry calls from idiots who wanted me to go fetch use lumber at ten cents a foot from construction sights ( they'd read about it in the  for sale section of the news paper) and then craft for them works of art for mere pennies.  When I' tried to tell them they were on the wrong track they'd rail at me and call me names.

I tried to do hand made guitars.  ( thank god I was still very young).  You'd put 5 or 7 hundred hours into a guitar and you were lucky if you could get $300 a pop.  It wasn't even minimum wage, You couldn't support a little family on that kind of money.

However if one wants to make money at woodworking there are a couple of ways to approach it.  Probably the way I'd prefer if I were to try again ( which I won't) would be to go after the high priced interior designers  (big city especially) and make up a rich and diverse portfolio using an expert photographer and a studio to shoot my work and  spend the money producing the portfolios for the interior designers  and give away some nice samples like a table and chair  of some kind so they can have them in their studios.  Of course, I'd  charge a princely sum for the work I did for their customers.

There is the custom cabinet end of things, but I think that's a dog because your fortune is tied to the economy while selling one off artsy fartsy pieces to rich people will never be tied to the economy.

The English language can often be frustrating. 

I am not a professional woodworker. 

Sawdust Soup is an interesting site.

---

Gene
'The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.' G. K. Chesterton

It's pretty impressive where you are now Cliff with the challenges of dyslexia. My hat off to you sir! Wow!

Cliff, let me post this question to you. When is it ok for a word to morph into something else to communicate the changing environment of our times?

What if words did not change meaning, what if there were lords that disallowed a word to be spoken for any reason other then its original intention. Go back even further, we would still be speaking with grunts and groans as the caveman did if we were not allowed to change and adapt words for the times we are in.

I admit I am in that group too that hates to see some words bastardized for the sake of modern pop culture. But some words change meaning to meet the demands of the times.

I am sure back in the day the word "Groove" had very few meanings compared to the meanings it has today. I don't think in the 1800's when someone talked about groove, they weren't talking about an emotion as in "Let's get in the groove" I am sure they talked of wagon wheel ruts and the groove in a kids marble table toy or the construction of a groove in a piece of machinery or a wood.

Yet here we are today using the word Groove to describe a mechanical joint and the way an emotion is felt, thank you 60's for that one!

Mouse, whoever would have thought up until thirty some odd years ago a "mouse" was going to direct a "cursor" on a computer "monitor".

Definition of Mouse, Monitor, Cursor up until thirty plus years ago had a completely different meaning than it does today.

I get the whole professional thing, my job is a Land Surveyor, licensed Land Surveyors are classified as Professionals just as Lawyers are. But it doesn't hurt my ego to call a carpenter a professional, I am ok with that. I am not really big into classifications anyway, they are fun, they are out dated as far as I am concerned, and if a Garbage collector wants to call himself a "Refuse Engineer" so be it, knock yourself out.

You can call me whatever you want, just don't call me late for dinner! LOL

Cliff said:

I am  on a one man crusade for the language.

 It really gets under my skin the way language is slaughtered.

Take Joe Rogan who  announces for MMA fights.  He misuses the word UTILIZE about a thousand times each fight.

Utilize is when you put something to work in a manner in which it was not intended. Use is for when you use it the way it was.  So: "I utilized  my boot heel to drive the tent pegs and then used an axe to chop wood."  But not for  Semi-literate moron Joe.  For him it is all about the extra syllables that he thinks make him sound smarter.  Except they don't, they prove the opposite.

Or that time when  Dr. Elliot  Spitzer during an episode of his failed TV show    was trying to find the word degenerated  and instead came up with the word DEVOLVE as if some how by sheer will power he could make the word mean that the thing he was talking about had De-Evolved which would of course require that it had ever evolved in the first place.  Devolve is used when one government or managerial body transfers power to another.  That's it.  And Doctor Spitzer should have known better.  Oddly once he used the word, it was then bastardized that way by half a dozen talking heads within a week or two because they didn't know what it meant either.  Copy cat morons in the media slaughtering the language.

Another one that gets my skin crawling is the ending of sentences with prepositions.

 The list goes on.

Ya see I'm so bloody darn dyslexic that I had to put in about fifty times the effort that most other people did to get by in school and every where else in life.  I couldn't spell even the simplest of words, grammar gave me apoplexy. Math??  Oh my~!!  I was utterly unable to recall a five digit  sequence long enough to repeat it back to you.  I couldn't add, subtract, multiply, or divide. I could use a calculator to add a series of numbers and do  the calculation any number of times and each time I'd get a different result.  I had to work at things.

One of the results I  have come away with is a certain concern for the language.

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops

Properly speaking our language is a colloquially defined one.  Unlike French and a bunch of others where they have a board of government appointed  scholars  who manage the language of their countries  ours is managed by the  most illogical demographic of all.   

It used to be that when we said it was colloquial that what was meant  was that literate  and educated people were the arbiters of the language.  Now it is Snoop Dog,  Dr Dre, Emm&Emm  or whatever trash the Hoi Polloi  is comprised of  in any given decade.  We have abandoned our language to the least educated people who also hold education and book learning in contempt.

So to answer your question of when words should change. They change when they change.  There are no controls at all anywhere in the US.  We have dictionaries but they are not authoritative. Dictionaries are merely the efforts of lexicographers to keep pace with  popular usage.

But to the question of the word  professional:

These are just a small handful  of perfectly good words   and phrases for which the word professional has been bastardized and misused by people who  - -for whatever reason - don't use the correct words and phrases:

Vocation, Avocation, Trade, Business Attire, Polite Conduct,  and  Expertise. 

Why abandon perfectly good words to replace them with a confusing and meaningless expression?

Professional can't mean all those  different things but people insist  on using the word those different ways.

I chalk it up to a combination of monkey-see-monkey-do, insecurity, and insufficient education.

I think that we all owe our children a duty going forward to preserve the language from corruption by the lowest common denominator.   I think that where our children are raised in homes where you sit straight, say please and thank you,  practice good manners in private and public, have a sense of fair play, honor, & dignity, respect your elders, show grace to the weak, and speak the language competently  that  the benefits  which will inure to them in the long haul will pay richly and  serve to protect our Nation in small but important ways without which we might as well abandon ourselves to the barbarians  such as  the OC movement.

The PE  license is a perfect example of institutionalizing  a bastardization.

My brother is a PE. He does consular  physical plant security all over the world for the USA.

But why the word professional? What did the people who came up with the name think that it brought to the party that some more appropriate word might not?  Why not EE as in Expert Engineer, or Certified Licensed Engineer? What did the word professional bring to the show?  I don't think it brought a single thing.  It's meaningless.

I think that some character somewhere just defaulted to it in a Monkey-See-Monkey-Do kind of thing.  Probably was the same kind of person who says that "Joe dresses professionally."  Whatever the devil that can possibly mean.

Joe get's paid to dress?

One of the reasons English is so frustrating is that, as John illustrates, it changes with usage. 

I believe it was Churchill that said something to the effect that Great Britain and America were two countries separated by a common language. However, the fluid nature of English is exactly why it is the ideal language for diplomats and aviators.

If English were not so malleable and rich, we'd be using 5 times the verbiage to describe the sharpness of a blade or the attributes of a comely woman or beautiful car. 

Your contention that the terms "Professionalism" and "Professionally" are fairly meaningless is right on. '-)  To describe someone as "professional" simply means the he or she is paid to do what they do. It has nothing to do with the quality of their work. It simply implies that their work is adequate enough to earn them money.

---

Gene
'The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.' G. K. Chesterton

You got me on the P.E. Cliff. I am grateful we are still LS, licensed landsurveyor. Then we have the guys with duel license, and their business cards are imprinted with P.E.L.S. or the older guys love P.L.S. Us younger guys are happy with L.S.

How about LE, Licensed Engineer.

So back to my original notice, Sawdust Soup is a great place to be if your interested in making money from woodworking! Check it out!

Cliff said:

Properly speaking our language is a colloquially defined one.  Unlike French and a bunch of others where they have a board of government appointed  scholars  who manage the language of their countries  ours is managed by the  most illogical demographic of all.   

It used to be that when we said it was colloquial that what was meant  was that literate  and educated people were the arbiters of the language.  Now it is Snoop Dog,  Dr Dre, Emm&Emm  or whatever trash the Hoi Polloi  is comprised of  in any given decade.  We have abandoned our language to the least educated people who also hold education and book learning in contempt.

So to answer your question of when words should change. They change when they change.  There are no controls at all anywhere in the US.  We have dictionaries but they are not authoritative. Dictionaries are merely the efforts of lexicographers to keep pace with  popular usage.

But to the question of the word  professional:

These are just a small handful  of perfectly good words   and phrases for which the word professional has been bastardized and misused by people who  - -for whatever reason - don't use the correct words and phrases:

Vocation, Avocation, Trade, Business Attire, Polite Conduct,  and  Expertise. 

Why abandon perfectly good words to replace them with a confusing and meaningless expression?

Professional can't mean all those  different things but people insist  on using the word those different ways.

I chalk it up to a combination of monkey-see-monkey-do, insecurity, and insufficient education.

I think that we all owe our children a duty going forward to preserve the language from corruption by the lowest common denominator.   I think that where our children are raised in homes where you sit straight, say please and thank you,  practice good manners in private and public, have a sense of fair play, honor, & dignity, respect your elders, show grace to the weak, and speak the language competently  that  the benefits  which will inure to them in the long haul will pay richly and  serve to protect our Nation in small but important ways without which we might as well abandon ourselves to the barbarians  such as  the OC movement.

The PE  license is a perfect example of institutionalizing  a bastardization.

My brother is a PE. He does consular  physical plant security all over the world for the USA.

But why the word professional? What did the people who came up with the name think that it brought to the party that some more appropriate word might not?  Why not EE as in Expert Engineer, or Certified Licensed Engineer? What did the word professional bring to the show?  I don't think it brought a single thing.  It's meaningless.

I think that some character somewhere just defaulted to it in a Monkey-See-Monkey-Do kind of thing.  Probably was the same kind of person who says that "Joe dresses professionally."  Whatever the devil that can possibly mean.

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker
Proud Supporter of Wounded Warrior Project and Homes For Our Troops