Oh man, the evolution of job names and how they reflect social and economic change is /fascinating/. Can you share any examples of different red and purple sanitation job names?
I mean, I haven’t made like some kind of huge study of it, I’m mostly familiar with the metropolitan Tapai trends so this might not hold up everywhere? And I don’t super want to give out specific names because there are a lot of people who are intentionally using ambiguous ones these days. But I can talk about general trends I guess? There’s a couple of big differences I’ve noticed.
Also like, I’m not gonna get super specific but usual “Infra won’t be able to entirely keep his Work Stuff out of this post” warnings apply here.
The purple names do tend to be a lot more ambiguous than the red ones. They felt really coy at first. Red names were a lot more direct, because it’s not like having a different name was going to make clean people respect us more, but the outwork jobs were more or less prestigious among other reds? If you did a dangerous job that brought money into the district you didn’t really dance around it. Purples want a name that can be used outside of work without immediately grossing everyone out.
And the other is that both sets have some overlap between specific kinds of work but they kinda ended up dividing up along different lines. Most red names were more closely related to what kind of pollution we worked with, and most purple names are more closely related to what part of the sanitation process we work. So for example with reds you had overlaps between people who worked with bodies, or garbage, or sewage, and with purples you get more overlap between incinerator workers and crematory workers, or corpsetakers and garbage collectors. And a lot of the purple names also overlap with clean jobs that use similar skill sets, which I guess ties in to the first point.
