An upmarket Chinese restaurant near to my flat has a sign outside saying "15 more seatings downstairs". Why is it that I like the word 'seatings' but detest the word 'standees', which is becoming increasingly common in a public transport context?
Incidentally, 'seatings' doesn't make it into the OED, but 'standees' does - albeit as "chiefly North American".
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4 comments:
An email sent to me yesterday informed me that some of my colleagues were "undertaking solutionising". As opposed to, I don't know, "working things out"?
The thing about "no standees" is that it doesn't take any more letters to write "no standing".
I feel that someone who stands should be a 'stander' not a 'standee'. So I would be happier with 'no standers'... Of course, if you were going for brevity, better than either 'no standees' or 'no standing' would be 'sit!'.
A "standee" must be someone who has been stood, like an addresee is someone who has been addressed,the "ee" suffix in English denoting the person who is the object of the action, the "er" suffix denoting the person doing the action. So unless someone is going around the bus jerking people to their feet, they're not "standees" at all.
A similar objection must be made to the word "escapee" - people who escape from prison are escapers, and as a chief sub on the Times once said, if there are "escapees", the would be the prison guards ...
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