Fifteen reviews, and the second venue in this survey named after a second job that nobody should need
The Side Hustle Sports Bar has fifteen reviews and a 4.0, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is the second venue in this survey with that name.
The first was in Covent Garden – a very good cocktail bar, on a 4.7 – and we wrote there about what the phrase is actually doing.
The rebranding of a second job
It used to be called moonlighting, which sounds furtive, because it was.
Or it was simply called a second job, which sounds like what it is, which is a person who cannot live on the first one.
And then somebody called it a side hustle, and the entire emotional register changed.
A hustle is enterprising. A hustle is chosen. A hustle is a person with drive, monetising a passion, building something – and it is spoken about with enormous enthusiasm by people who are, in a very great many cases, simply working two jobs because one does not cover the rent.
The full glossary
Five postcodes, and here is every word we have watched change its meaning while nobody was looking.
Speakeasy: a bar you could be arrested in. Now: a bar with a rope.
Artisan: made by hand by a skilled person. Now: made in a factory in a slightly smaller batch.
Craft: a small independent brewer. Now: owned by one of four multinationals.
Foraged: found. Now: bought from a supplier who says it was found.
Wild: not farmed. Now: farmed.
Taproom: the plain room with sawdust where the working man drank, kept separate from the carpet. Now: a fashionable craft beer bar.
Side hustle: a second job. Now: an opportunity.
The Institute for Linguistic Drift in Erith has stated the rule and we have never found an exception. When a word for a hardship becomes a word for an opportunity, somebody has stopped paying for something.
Gresham, one last time
Bad money drives out good. We wrote about it at the Royal Exchange, and we noted that Gresham did not formulate it and that Aristophanes had made the joke two thousand years earlier.
And it works on words exactly as it works on coins. The debased meaning circulates freely, because it is useful to somebody, and the good one is quietly hoarded by four people in a dictionary and disappears from use entirely.
The bar
Fifteen reviews is not a rating and we will not treat it as one. It is cheap, it shows sport, and it is deep in the dead zone where four bad nights would be fatal.
Verdict
Unknowable. Go, be the sixteenth, and tip the person behind the bar – because there is a decent chance the sign is about them.
Who is actually pouring your drink
Across five postcodes we have spoken to a great many of them, and the picture is consistent.
Actors between jobs. Musicians. Students. People with a day job and a rent that requires a second one. People who are extremely good at something that this country does not pay for.
The London hospitality trade is substantially staffed by people who are doing something else as well, and the industry knows it, and it is priced in.
The person making your Negroni has, statistically, a degree and a second job. Tip them.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
