Talk:Busman's holiday

This article doesn't seem to make sense

"A 'busman's holiday' is a holiday spent by a bus driver travelling on a bus: it is no break from his usual routine."

Does being a passenger in a bus, as opposed to driving it, not constitute a break from his usual routine? More generally, providing a service and using that service are two completely different things, so it doesn't make sense to equate one to the other. OK, so there's a connection in that the busman is in a similar environment to his working one, but this is a very different statement from the one about doing the same kind of work.

"By analogy, anyone who spends his holiday doing his normal job is taking a 'busman's holiday'."

Aside from the contradiction with what precedes it, what does "his normal job" mean?

For example, I imagine that a high proportion of people employed as computer programmers also do at least some programming in their spare time. But I'm not sure if it counts as your "normal job" if you're working on your personal projects, rather than software products for your company, and possibly using very different languages/tools/technologies. Still, it's the same basic kind of activity, and so I think it satisfies the definition of a busman's holiday.

That said, what is the definition? I've found, among others:

• a holiday or vacation during which one does something similar to what one does as work (Wiktionary)
• a vacation or day off from work spent in an activity closely resembling one's work, as a bus driver taking a long drive (dictionary.reference.com)
• leisure time spent doing the same thing that one does at work (OPD)

The last of these implies that, as I'd understood, it's still a busman's holiday if it's just something you do in the evenings or at weekends (or otherwise outside of both your job and your normal working hours) that is similar to what you do for your job. The use of the word "holiday" in the name is an exaggeration that is part of the idiomaticity of the phrase.

Moreover, there seem to be four stories on what the phrase alludes to:

1. a bus driver going for a ride in a bus (this article, Wiktionary, and various other OneLook hits)
2. a bus driver going for a long leisurely drive (various OneLook hits)
3. a coach driver driving others to their holiday destinations (next paragraph of this article)
4. a driver of a horse-drawn bus (back in the day) checking up on the horses while off duty [1]

Of these, 2 seems to make most sense. I'm having trouble understanding 3. Does this mean that they would make a bit of extra money by doing this in addition to the routes they are required to serve as part of their jobs, or what? 4 is something different again: somebody voluntarily carrying out some work-related task while not actually working. But would this generally be considered to constitute a busman's holiday? I have mixed thoughts about this. — Smjg (talk) 00:06, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I don't think there is any point in this article. "Busman's holiday" is already well defined in Wiktionary. The definition in OED "a holiday or other period of leisure time in which a person does something of a similar nature to his or her normal occupation." shows a first usage in 1893, so it's hardly going to be connected with coach trips. The words either mean what they mean at face value, in which case it's no different from "accountant's holiday" or anything else, or they are the particular idiomatic phrase which is correctly defined at Wiktionary and badly defined in this stub. It could be a professional cook who spends their holiday time cooking, either for a family group or on a volunteering project, or anyone else who's doing, outside work, the same thing that they do when at work. I've redirected to the natural target article. PamD 22:38, 29 January 2015 (UTC)