The Left could do with some fresh vocabulary. As an ex once told me, “Stop using ‘Menshevik’ as an insult — it’s weird.” And as the proud coiner of terms with dubious analytical value, I should welcome commentary announcing the rise of a new post-Fordist actor. Jacobin’s dictionary, however, will be kept free of the word “precariat.” Beyond misguided, it’s a disorienting concept.

Yet even Dissent, a gloomy bastion of social democratic orthodoxy, is speaking the new language. Its latest issue sports an essay on the Freelancers’ Union by Atossa Abrahamian and a review from John Schmitt that both engage with Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.

Though it has only entered into wider circulation with that book’s release, “precariat” has been around for a while. It was coined by French sociologists in the eighties and, much like “hella,” got its biggest break when it was mentioned a decade later in the Socialist Register.