Getting back to cricket, I learned from the utterly brilliant Australian novel about cricket bat-making, music, and life called Willowman by Inga Simpson of the term ‘pod shaver’ - someone who carves willow pods into cricket bats. Simpson says the word has been dropped from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It certainly didn’t make it into my OED Shorter from 1993, nor could I find it on the OED’s online site.

However, some academics from Nottingham argue that there is a pod shaving revival afoot. In a 2021 paper presented at the 18th Rural Entrepreneurship Conference in Swansea, they argue that rural entrepreneurs have caused a re-birth in authentic artisanal cricket bats in the UK. They compare it to the growth in artisanal cheesemaking.

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Apparently the numbers have doubled and not just in Gloucester. In the Willowman, cricketers Todd and Liv Harrow’s parents are cheesemakers, perhaps no coincidence.

Work and language are constantly evolving and co-dependent. Work occupies so much of our time, and requires continual learning and specialisation that inevitably words must be carved out the lexicon much as a bat is carved from what was once a growing willow, to help us describe and understand these new ways of being.

Jobs like words can go out of fashion, or become obsolete - but just occasionally, like pod shavers, they can be reborn. As in all aspects of life, the present informs the future and the past and the past informs the present and the future.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy and is a director at ed tech startup Become Education. Email to opinion@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright

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