When a later time gives an old kind of behaviour at work a new name, the name alone cannot say whether something new has happened. This short study asks how a public record decides the question. It reads the fifteen outside cases in which GAEKJU, a studio that records where human flaws are left in words at work, asks whether a kind of talk has changed across eras. Each case is GAEKJU's summary of one or two published studies, from a 1911 account of deliberate slow work to a 2022 survey of workers in the United States, set beside a later time and written up with three readings, a lean, a dated judgment, a condition that would show it wrong and a proposal. The cases are summaries, not the studies, and the English is this study's translation of the Korean originals.
The study finds three habits. The cases read a new name as a record of who was looking: a manager, a survey, colleagues or the workers themselves. Where they keep the gesture the same, they place the change in where talk is said, kept and seen rather than in people. And they leave the test of sameness to data that would follow the same people or look back before the name, data no case holds. The contribution is to show, in a public record, a way of asking the old-wine-in-new-bottles question that keeps it open.