The earliest example of the word “gig” found by Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information, is from a 1952 piece by Jack Kerouac about his gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad.

“There's kind of a semantic shell game here, as the promoters of the new economy trade on the whisper of romance that still clings to ‘gig,’ Nunberg wrote in a Los Angeles Times story on the word-of-the-year candidate. “In the beginning, the word evoked a fantasy of freedom and escape from the soul-deadening routine of a permanent job.”