"report" 'someone reporting to a manager'

[Baker, John]

        I too would have guessed that this usage isn't recent, but it
looks like I would have been wrong.  It's been prevalent only since the
late 1980s, which is recent enough that the recency illusion seems to be
at work.

        Using the allnewsplus database on Westlaw, I searched for
examples of "direct report" (since searching for "report" by itself
would be a fool's errand).  The earliest I found was from 1986, when the
collocation "direct report" was used 23 times, and 2 of those uses
referred to an employee who reports to his or her supervisor.  I should
explain that by "collocation" I mean any instance of "direct report"
appearing in a news report, even where one sentence ends with "direct"
and the next begins with "report."  Also, I'm sure that there are
isolated examples of this usage that are at least several years older; I
was checking to see when the term began to find widespread usage.
Finding the earliest use would be useful, it just wasn't what I was
doing.

        For 1988, there were 8 examples of the collocation, 2 in this
sense.  It began to take off the next year:  12/17 in 1989, and 9 out of
a sample of 20 in 1990 (with 39 uses of the collocation in total).  By
1995, there were 103 uses of the collocation, with 18 out of a sample of
20 using this sense.  (The increasing number of uses by year is partly a
function of Westlaw and its tendency not to include older source
materials.)

        So "direct report," to mean an employee who reports directly to
the person in question, began to be used in the mid-1980s and became the
dominant use in 1989, and by the mid-1990s it was so widely used that it
swamped all other meanings.


John Baker




-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Arnold Zwicky
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 5:45 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "report" 'someone reporting to a manager'

On May 28, 2009, at 1:42 PM, Dave Wilton wrote:

> From my personal experience in Silicon Valley, this sense of "report"
> is so frequent that I never even considered that someone might find it

> unusual.
> It's not all that recent, being around for at least a decade or so,
> possibly much older. I can't recall if it was in use back when I
> worked for the government.
>
> Searching for "direct report" might help in separating out the chaff.


??  usually when we criticize claims that some usage is "recent", we
cite numbers of occurrences from 50-400 years.  something on the order
of 10 years ago *is* recent.

if you have older occurrences, bring them out, rather than throwing the
burden on me to find examples i've already spend hours searching for.

i fully expected people to say that they were long familiar with this
usage in a restricted technical context.  i wouldn't be at all
surprised.  (i never claimed it was new, only new to me.)  so bring on
the citations.

arnold, bowing out of this topic, leaving it to people who actually have
access to relevant texts

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