- a proposito di linguaggi

job
Here's an unusual use of the English language:
I got a job by accident.
When we were graduate students in physics, and we observed as each student in turn disappeared beyond the event horizon of the final public oral (FPO), to be torn apart by the tidal forces of the job-market black hole, one of the few triangulation points we learned was the following datum:

Job offers are bosons.
That is, they obey Bose-Einstein (B-E) statistics: if you are in a one-job-offer state, your probability of transitioning to a two-job-offer state is twice the probability that the poor guy with no job offer will get even one; if you are in a two-job-offer state, your chances of getting another offer are three times his chance of getting a first job offer. The injustice of this situation is obvious, since the person with no job offers needs a job offer much more than the person with two, who is going to turn down one of the offers anyway. It is said that the market is cold, and while no precise temperature measurement has been reported, it appears that we may be close to the Bose Condensation (BEC) regime, where all the job offers condense on one applicant. On the basis of this observation, I think that an effective jobs program would be to give that one applicant a secretary. That would not only open up a secretary position, but the excess job offers could be turned down promptly, creating a population inversion, etc.
Even I get tired of teeteringly extended metaphors, and I hadn't even discussed lasing. It is probably fair to note that early research on job offer statistics is implied in the classic research of Saint Matthew (Matthew Principle) However, I first learned about quantum job-offer statistics from Steve, a student of Arthur S. Wightman, so it may be that the principle has now been placed on a rigorous axiomatic field-theory foundation.

New research suggests that MOTAS statistics are also bosonic. For more detail on job stats, try following the link at the BLS entry.

Although they're not pronounced identically, it seems appropriate that the Biblical Job and the quotidian job should have the same spelling. Both are associated with great suffering. Incidentally, the English word job has been borrowed into German as a masculine noun. This loan is reputed to have a German pronunciation simmilar to the English (something like what would be spelled ``jawp''). But it's a very common word, and without researching the matter, I suspect that as usual its pronunciation will go a bit native and start to resemble that of the name of the Biblical character (also spelled Job or almost equivalently Hiob).
http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/J02.html