Staff = employee

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Staff = employee
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Nov 8, 2011, at 2:02 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
>> I have fought many battles with Japanese clients who want to talk about
>> their "staffs" (employees) as "sutafu" is a common Japanese word. AFAIK,
>> I have always won, but it is a losing battle.
>>
>> Today, Jimmy Wales' Wiki statement has the following
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2011Appeal1):
>>
>> -----
>> Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like
>> 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff.
>
> a fairly common development: an original collective or mass (singular) noun is reinterpreted as a zero-plural, and/or a singular (non-collective) noun develops, with a regular plural. Â so: from original mass "spam" ("much spam") we get zero-plural "spam" ("many/100 spam") and ordinary count "spam" ("many/100 spams").
>
> arnold
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

Like _troop_, once only a specific unit composed of calvarymen, now
any random, individual soldier of any branch of the Army, in addition
to retaining its original meaning in relevant contexts.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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