I'm just reading "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. I didn't get far – on page 5 he uses the phrase "Maybe I should take up surgery on the side."
From the context I would deduce it means something like changing/flipping the side, but googling for this sentence I only find references to the book itself. Is this an established idiom and what's the connection to a surgery here?
To give some more context:
[…] it had never occurred to him that writing could be hard. I told
him I was just as interested in his answers — it had never occurred to
me that writing could be easy. Maybe I should take up surgery on the
side.
Best Answer
The phrase on the side is a tricky one, because it has several possible meanings.
If I had a cyst on my torso, and was going to have it removed next week, I could tell you that I was going to have surgery on the side.
Of course, in this context, we are referring to one of these two idiomatic meanings (definitions from NOAD):
There's nothing furtive going on here, so that rules out meaning #2. What the writer really means here:
In this context, the writer is trying to say that the two could learn a lot from each other: what comes natural to one is not nearly so simple for the other.
One more important detail: no one takes up surgery on the side. We might sell real estate on the side, we might tutor or teach on the side, or we might work in a restaurant or retail store on the side. But surgery is a skill and profession that requires years of intense training. So the writer here is being humorous. He doesn't really intend to take up surgery as an extra job, but he's reinforcing the notion that sometimes it's easy to forget how difficult something can be after we have been fully trained.