being a professional
.."We all know that journalism is a very honorable profession."
"Excuse me, Elspeth," said Ridley, "but I don't like to hear it called a profession. That word has been worked to death. There in people in the newspaper business who like to call it a profession, but in in general we try not to cant about ourselves. We try not to join the modern rush to ennoble our ordinary, necessary work. We see too much of that in our job. Banking and insurance have managed to raise themselves almost to the level of religions; medicine and the law are priesthoods, against which no whisper must heard; teachers insist that they do their jobs for the good of mankind, without any thought of getting a living. And all this self-praise, all this dense fog of respectability which has been created around ordinary, necessary work, is choking our honesty about ourselves. It is the dash of old-time roguery which is still found in lournalism - the slightly raffish, declasse air of it - which is its fascination. We still live by our wits. We haven't bullied and public-rclations-agented the public to the point where they think that we are gods walking the earth, and beyond all criticism. We are among the last people who are not completely, utterly and damnably respectable. There is a little of the old Adam even in the dullest of us, and it keeps us young."
"Excuse me, Elspeth," said Ridley, "but I don't like to hear it called a profession. That word has been worked to death. There in people in the newspaper business who like to call it a profession, but in in general we try not to cant about ourselves. We try not to join the modern rush to ennoble our ordinary, necessary work. We see too much of that in our job. Banking and insurance have managed to raise themselves almost to the level of religions; medicine and the law are priesthoods, against which no whisper must heard; teachers insist that they do their jobs for the good of mankind, without any thought of getting a living. And all this self-praise, all this dense fog of respectability which has been created around ordinary, necessary work, is choking our honesty about ourselves. It is the dash of old-time roguery which is still found in lournalism - the slightly raffish, declasse air of it - which is its fascination. We still live by our wits. We haven't bullied and public-rclations-agented the public to the point where they think that we are gods walking the earth, and beyond all criticism. We are among the last people who are not completely, utterly and damnably respectable. There is a little of the old Adam even in the dullest of us, and it keeps us young."