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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Funny, a personal servant makes us uneasy, but a personal/executive assistant does not. What’s the difference? They’re both employees and both are being paid to do tasks that need to get done but aren’t worth their boss’s time.

Is it the extra indirection of the salary coming from company instead of personal coffers that does it? What if the person hiring the assistant has 100% ownership of the company like in the case of a small business?

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When I had a corporate job, the administrative assistant to the big boss in my department had real power as de facto gatekeeper and seemed to be quite well compensated.

It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.

Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Xgd7Cjm98

Yeah, that had occured to me. It just didn't really seem pertinent to this particular discussion. It struck me as a tangent, so I opted to not get into it.

Fair enough.

The U.S., Great Britain, and France also have a historical legacies of African slavery that factor into this perception. In the U.S., the effective enslavement of African American women as domestic workers with $8/day wages lasted well into the 1960s. A major advance during the 1970s was the ability of African American domestic workers to unionize and push for humane working conditions. During the New Deal era (1930s/40s), social security and other services did not extend to Black domestic workers — which at the time constituted a significant portion of Black women in the workforce. Given this legacy, it is no surprise that people in the U.S. view domestic work with some concern. So for many of us, the concern is not so much around the work (you do what you have to do to put food on the table, etc, no shame in that), but it is the fact that people doing this work have been subject to unchecked sexual abuse, extreme wage discrimination, and a host of other horrendously inhuman working conditions. The text “When Affirmative Acrion was White” by Katznelson is one source among many.

Generally the executive assistant is paid for by the company and he or she works for the company, just like the executive does. In fact there are lots of management types who don’t make significantly more that their assistants do.

Even the assistants often times have their own assistants, very common in Hollywood.

In part it might be where the salary is coming from, but even when someone personally hires a personal assistant, it doesn't have the same connotation as personal servant.

I think the main implication is that a personal assistant is a qualified, educated person who is well positioned to find another job, while a personal servant evokes images of someone less well off and more at the mercy of the employer. There is a second implication as well: you hire a personal assistant to help you with your job, to be more productive and get more done, but you hire a personal servant to help you with your personal life, so you can get more leisure time and be more lazy.

In some ways, there might not be much practical difference between a personal assistant and a personal servant, but the words have different connotations. There are some questions that I think are relevant to ask oneself: Do you have the same reaction to the word "personal servant" and the words "butler," "housekeeper," "majordomo," etc? When you think of the word "personal servant," is the first image that comes to your mind that of a maid, a footman, a housekeeper or a butler, or something else?

Also, I'm not American so I can't comment on this point, but it may also be that the word "servant" is uncomfortably close to the word "slave".

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