Something special: In our world of specialisms, getting to do the job just right 😜

Undaunted by the definition that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, specialism is increasingly becoming the order of the day on the shop floor no less than in the groves of academe.

Little boys, for instance, need no longer insist with single-track determination that when they grow up, they want to be engine drivers but can instead opt to fulfil the function of a “dukey rider”. In the US, this is apparently the person who couples and uncouples cars in a railway yard and operates the handbrakes to control speed.

A career as a “chick sexer” whose job it is to determine the gender of new-born chickens and separate the hens from the boys, is not for the birds either, what with Japan reportedly offering a university degree in this discipline.

Though it might not be as stimulating as it sounds, the profession of a “breast buffer”, which involves buffing the breast of a shoe which is the forepart of the heel, has its dedicated practitioners, as does the equally delicate task of “mother repairing”, which consists of removing dirt particles from the “mother” of the moulds used in industry.

Those with a stomach for hard work can make a go of “belly building”, or fitting the interior parts or “bellies” of pianos, while others might choose to stick to “legend making”, or pasting logos on paper for the fabrication of display boards and signs.

Presumably, on the premise that what counts is not so much what you do for a living but how you are said to do it, garbage collectors in the West now call themselves “sanitation engineers” and extras in the film industry prefer to be known as “atmosphere personnel”.

The specialised division of labour, however, was perhaps best summed up by the duo who wrote murder mysteries under the pseudonym of Ellery Queen, and who, when asked how they shared their task, would reply that one wrote the nouns and the other the verbs.

A political analogy might be the Modi-Amit pair, one doing the talking and the other doing the planning.