The difference between staff and staffer.

In English, we add er to some words, changing their meaning. Sometimes we add er to verbs, changing an action into a person who does the action. So, sing will become singer, a person who sings. Er can also be added to nouns that describe subjects to refer to a person who is a specialist in that subject. So, astronomy becomes astronomer, or a person who studies astronomy. A shoemaker is someone who makes shoes. Er can also relate to a place, so that someone who comes from the north is a northerner. Someone from New York is a New Yorker. When we refer to the library staff, we mean a group of people who work at the library, without examining them individually. If we wish to speak about an individual who is on the library staff, it is common in English to say a library staffer. This means someone who belongs to or is associated with the library staff, in the same way that five-year-old children might be described as a kindergartners because they attend kindergarten.

Thai English misunderstandings.

In Thai English, people often make the mistake of referring to staffs when they mean more than one member of the staff. In fact, the correct word should be staffers. The word staff refers to many people who work in the same place. If you are referring to the people who work at different places, then you may use staffs. For example, the library workers at Thammasat, Chulalongkorn, and Kasetsart Universities are on different staffs. Everyone who works at the TU Libraries belongs to a single united staff. The staff of the TU economics library and the staff of the TU journalism library are all part of the TU Library staff.

More challenges with er.

In Thai English, there is also frequent confusion about the use of er. For example, in discussions of management and labor. Management refers to the boss or bosses, while labor is an abstract term, not referring to specific individuals, who work under the direction of management. Thai English usually gets wrong the fact that if we wish to speak or write about someone who is associated with labor, that person should be termed a laborer (or in British English, labourer):

During the strike, laborers and their families went hungry.

In Thai English, even very educated people will write about “labors” when laborers or workers are meant. If you mean individuals, you must say or write laborers.  The sentence “The labors went on strike” is not correct English. If you are confused or in doubt, just use the word worker instead of laborer.

Finally, er is used to discuss aspects of people, such as when we say:

Uncle Nui is a big drinker.

That means Uncle Nui, whoever he is, drinks a lot.

Like many aspects of written and spoken English, using er does not always involve rules you can easily learn. Sometimes an er is used for a job, whereas other times the word ends in ist. While we have already mentioned shoemakers, people who work in journalism are called journalists. There are other jobs which end in neither er nor ist, so these must just be learned and remembered as you read more and more English, see them often, and become familiar with them: civil servant, fireman, waitress, hostess, employee, and so on.

How soccer got its name.

Another famous English word ending in er is soccer. In the 1860s, soccer was called association football, because at the time the UK Football Association was a new thing. Association football was different from another popular football game, rugby. The name of rugby came from a noted school in England, the Rugby School. Soon, British students created a nickname for the sport of rugby, calling it rugger. This term is still used. In 1863, one player was asked if he wanted to play rugger, and instead of saying he wanted to play association football, he invented his own slang term for “association,” and so the term soccer was born. According to this story, which may or may not be true, it was first called “asoccer” and only later was this abbreviated further to soccer.

Does it end in er or or?

Some nouns that originate from verbs end in er while others end in or. Again, there is no easy rule for knowing how these words are spelled, you just have to become familiar with them and know what they should look like:

director

employer

lecturer

performer

prosecutor

teacher

editor

inspector

visitor.

Still other such words end in ar:

liar

beggar

And there are even a few of these words which end in ee:

employee

trustee.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a useful and reliable guide which does not seem to be in the TU Libraries collection but can be obtained by Interlibrary Loan, discusses how some scholars of the English language have tried to find a general rule for why and how some words end in er and others in or. Fowler’s concludes: “The problem remains unresolved.”

The Oxford English Dictionary agrees, adding the observation that the difference in word endings is “purely historical and orthographical [meaning concerned with spelling]: in the present spoken language they are both pronounced [the same]. In received spelling, the choice between the two forms is often capricious, or determined by other than historical reasons.”

So you just have to learn which word is which, without being able to follow any helpful rule. As a language, English developed in all sorts of odd ways with many bizarre and unexpected influences. It was not conceived in a practical or systematic way for the convenience of people who are trying to learn it.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).