A botcher is a clumsy bungling workman. He is found in every trade and profession, and he is one of the direct causes of the high cost of living. A botched job is expensive at any price. Sooner or later it has to be done over. No one can afford to keep very long in his employ a man who doesn’t take pains to do his work neatly, thoroughly and well.
We recently watched a boy in the act of blacking his shoes. He was particular about getting a high polish on the toes. The heels got no blacking at all, not even a rub of the brush. It is pretty safe to predict that a boy who forms the habit of shining half his shoes, and slighting the other half will grow up to be a botcher in other kinds of work.
We know a man who always blacks the heels of his shoes first. He says his father insisted on his doing it that way when he was a boy. It is now a habit with him. However pressed for time he is, having first polished the heels he never slights the fronts of his shoes. There is always time for the toes. Similar characteristics are found in every thing he undertakes to do. He is just as painstaking in piling up wood in his cellar as he is in the making of a mahogany sideboard.
The habit of painstaking is a good financial investment. It must be found in every genius. It ought to have a place in every man’s life whether or not he is engaged in work that is open to inspection. He, who when a boy, practices doing to a finish every job he undertakes and not slighting part of it because it is more or less concealed, will find, when he has grown to manhood, that he has escaped the curse which falls on some workmen, namely, of being a botcher.
E. W.
Our Paper – Concord Junction, Mass. – October 25, 1913
– Jeff Burks
Excellent post. It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer people left who are willing to do a job well and not cut corners. I feel like we’re training a whole new generation of botchers. Good on you guys for pointing it out.
The botcher. Friends with the perfectionist perhaps.
I’m curious about how the term botcher came to be. In the UK it’s more often ‘bodger’ – originally an itinerant chair maker and I kind of wonder if the slurring of bodging had more to do with snobbery, class and mechanisation than proficiency.
Those are two different words with similar sounds. We have the word bodger here with the same meaning as in the UK. The word botcher comes from the 14th century “bocchen” – to repair. In the 1520’s that word came to mean “to spoil by unskillful work” (http://www.etymonline.com/).
Jeff: Thanks for bringing these pithy paragraphs to us. Your posts are welcome reminders of good practice and right thinking. I hope you continue to bring the wisdom of our ancestors to the modern community.
I think it’s funny that people think these topics are new. There is nothing new about laziness. Thanks for the view into the past, present, and likely future.
If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right!