The latest was "wait staff", read in a news report the other day.
It sounded so American and so, dare Civis say it, straining too hard to be correct in a world sensitive to gender and diversity issues.
A survey of jobs on three online sites reveals calls for wait staff/waitstaff and waiting staff easily outnumber mentions of waiters or waiters/waitresses.
"Server" and the abomination "waitperson" popped up only once.
Food and beverage attendant — a fancy term for waiter or with an expectation of wider duties? — was used often.
Waiter more commonly has come to cover all sexes, just like actor has. Waiter/waitress only appeared a few times.
Waitress could never stand alone given justified gender discrimination hiring laws.
According to Google’s Ngram search of books, waiter appeared about 50% more than waitress in 2022. It was on the way up and waitress heading down.
The job site Seek under Hospitality and Tourism has "waiting staff" as one of its categories.
At least, the awful word waitron is not waiting in the wings. It popped up in the early 1800s before re-emerging in the 1980s.
Its frequency peaked in 2006, and it’s fading fast. It was promoted for its gender-neutral advantages, perhaps paired with the word patron.
Of course, these days rude expressions as serving girl, serving lad or serving wench (ouch!) are permanently out the back in the history files.
If the only choice is between wait staff and waiting staff, Civis prefers the latter.
Maybe waiter can make a comeback. We shall have to wait and see.
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Observant readers might have noticed, thanks to the ODT’s daily 100 Years Ago column, that Civis in December 1924 commented on the word "crib" as in a modest holiday home.
"Shack and crib are words in good standing," he said, "though shack is American".
Civis 2024 was intrigued by the predecessor’s further comment that "crib is a Shakespeare word and earlier".
Sure enough, Henry in Henry VI. Part I (1597) in this soliloquy is taken aback by his subjects’ accommodation.
"Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great"
The shifting meaning of crib typifies how slippery language is.
Crib was, generally, a derogatory term for a tiny house or shop, before in the 1800s it came also to mean a cheap brothel, the crib being the room and the prostitute the crib-girl.
Thieves used a slang version for the house or shop they would target — "to crack a crib".
Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) refers several times to cribs. Crib then, and onwards, was used as well as a verb for the act of thieving.
Later in that century, it referred to bars and cheap nightclubs. Then, after World War 2 crib was back to meaning a small dwelling, notably for African-American writers.
To turn everything upside down, stars showed off their mansions in an early 2000s MTV show Cribs.
Perhaps, cribs in Otago and Southland can encompass the huge holiday houses of Wanaka in addition to the Toko Mouth cottage.
Whatever the word’s etymology, curmudgeonly Civis calls on southern people stubbornly to sustain their quaint and distinctive use of crib. Baches must be banished to the north.
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We are still permitted to use crib as in a bed for a baby, especially this time of year.
Civis wishes everyone a happy Christmas and signs out singing: "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed."
