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Reader question: Please explain “status quo” in this headline: Obama’s best jobs plan might be status quo (AP, September 7, 2011). My comments: That means, in a nutshell, there’s nothing new to Obama’s new jobs plan. Or, to put it more sympathetically, there’s only so much an American President can do to help its workers. Well, without attempting to put too fine a point upon it, we can make a few sweeping generalizations about Barack Obama’s politics and American politics in general. And let’s make a few generalizations pertaining to, er, the status quo in the American jobs market. The status quo, you see, is Latin for the way it is. Literally “the state in which” everything is, the status quo means the way things are, good or bad. Being originally Latin, its “first known use” as accepted English is pretty late, 1807 (Merriam-Webster.com). But anyways, in English political jargon, the status quo is the current state of affairs as a whole, political, social and otherwise. In the above example, the status quo refers to the American jobs market as a whole, good and bad. Obviously there’s something bad about it – there are too few jobs. Hence, the Obama Administration plans to change it. And it is a job that’s difficult of accomplishment. Anyone who attempts to change the status quo involving society at large knows it is difficult of accomplishment. There’s always resistance because a lot of people who benefit from the status quo want to preserve it. Fewer jobs, for instance, are not exactly something the extreme rich capitalists mind very much. For one thing, fewer jobs means greater competition for them, which means a lot of people will agree to work for less, which, in the long run, means greater profit for the corporation. | 
