Staff Is/Are?
At my place of employment we say a closing announcement at the end of each day. Part of the announcement is "staff is available at the front entrance." This sounds incorrect to me, but I am not sure if I am hypercorrecting the sentence. My question is should 'staff' take a singular or plural verb when referring to multiple employees? What do you think?
Comments
Great question!
My own thought is that you make a good point, Shalee. Yeah, if there are more than one person available, then the noun is plural, therefore "are".
However, your boss has a different intuition, and so that means he may have a different meaning than you when he says "Staff is..." I actually sympathize with your boss, because from the customer's point of view, they wouldn't care if there was one or more staff members waiting at the entrance. The only thing a customer would care about is the presence of SOME staff (minimally 1). The singular/plural distinction is irrelevant to a customer and your boss on some level understands this.
Posted by: James Stevens | July 27, 2007 7:33 PM