The Idler’s Glossary was released in October 2008, on the cusp of the Great Recession. The Wage Slave’s Glossary, another volume of "anti-economic etymology," was just released. Co-author Josh Glenn explains how we've incorporated work-related jargon into our lives:
[Downtime] was a mid-century term that meant time when a machine is out of action or unavailable for use. And today, of course, this means that human beings who aren't working are compared to machines that are being serviced, or robots that are being recharged. And the worst thing of all, is that many of us now use "downtime" to describe our own weekends and vacations.
An excerpt from The Wage Slave’s Glossary here. In 2009, the authors discussed a similar logic in our reaction to idleness. Co-author Mark Kingwell:
The Latin word negotium, which gives us English terms for business and transaction, actually means the negation of otium, which means leisure. But then otium gets annexed into the pejorative word ‘otiose’, which means useless or redundant. The language we use contains the clues the reversal of values that got us here, thinking that work is more important than leisure. The ancient philosophers knew better. Work is mere necessity; leisure is divine.
The Dish 