He Can’t Give an ‘A’ to Workaholic

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me if I knew how to spell workaholic . “Is it a-holic or o-holic ?” she asked. I told her that, since it’s one of those made-up words, I thought she could spell it either way. I said, “Personally, I’d go with o-holic , because it’s taken from alc-O-holic .”

I still think that’s a reasonable answer, but the next day I looked it up in Houghton Mifflin’s American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. It says: work-a-holic ; then, for derivation, WORK + (ALC)OHOLIC. I don’t know why the editors changed that “o” to “a” and got work-A-holic, but there it is. I’m not going to argue with Houghton Mifflin. Suppose I convinced them?

I prefer to use compulsive worker or even work addict instead of workaholic. The use of aholic or even -oholic as a suffix meaning addict doesn’t settle comfortably in my mind. For one thing, it seems to imply that an alcoholic is someone addicted to alc.

We Americans take naturally to filching parts of words and converting them into suffixes for other words. We don’t think much about it; we just do it. There’s no point in criticizing the habit. It has made such pervasive inroads into the language that there’s nothing we could do about it, even if we wanted to.

Alcoholic has lent it’s -oholic segment principally to workaholic, but I’ve often heard chocoholic for chocolate addicts, and even cocaholic, referring to an addiction to Coca-Cola or, in some circles, cocaine.

But in workaholic, the - oholic borrowing seems particularly infelicitous. I’ve never been able to accept the implied parallel between an addiction to alcohol and an addiction to work. What impels someone to work more and harder than most others strikes me as a positive driving force--either an overpowering need for accomplishment or a nagging feeling that time spent not working is time wasted.

No one has ever suggested that I suffer from this curse, this overwhelming aversion to idleness, but I see it in my wife. She’s a psychiatric social worker with an overblown case load that would drive any normal, bright person to drink, at the very least.

Recently, one of our friends asked me, “How’s Jeannie?” I said, “She’s working much too hard.” The friend shrugged. “Well, that’s the way she is.” I think if Jeannie vowed to spend the rest of her life just relaxing, she’d work herself to death doing it. That’s a vital force within her. She works hard, she plays hard and she rests fitfully.

An alcoholic is quite another case. He may or may not be a hard worker, but he craves whatever it is that alcohol does for him. Perhaps it dulls parts of the brain, inducing forgetfulness, releasing inhibitions; perhaps it nourishes dreams of glory. Whatever it is, his craving can be satisfied, for a time, by swallowing a potion.

If a work addict--say, Jeannie--has a craving, it is a craving she can satisfy only by accomplishing something. In Jeannie’s case, it might be cleaning, sewing, ironing, tidying the fridge or doing any number of household tasks. If she can’t find anything she thinks would be really worthwhile, she can rearrange furniture, reset books in a more aesthetically pleasing array or go outdoors and prune shrubs, plant flowers, start a compost heap or paint some chairs.

When I hear, “He’s a workaholic,” I get a mental picture of someone like Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend,” sitting in an 8th Avenue bar, fingering a shot glass, staring at a row of bottles while picturing himself as a happy stevedore or a deep-breathing, ax-wielding lumberjack.

Obviously, workaholic --for me, anyway--just doesn’t do the job it’s intended for.