| 词组 | employe, employee |
| 释义 | employe, employee The French word employé (rhymes with say) was first used in English in the early 19th century. Its form is that of the past participle of the verb employer, "to use, employ," and its meaning is basically "employed one." The feminine form is employée, "a female employe." The feminine form never had much success in English, but employé continued in occasional use well into the 20th century: • The depositors were wage-earners; railroad employe's, mechanics, and day labourers —Willa Cather, A Lost Lady, 1923 Eventually, of course, both employé and employée were superseded by the English employee, formed by combination of employ and the familiar suffix -ee. The earliest known occurrence of employee is in Thoreau's Waiden, published in 1854. The OED indicated in 1897 that employee was rare in the U.S., but by 1926 it was well enough established for H. W. Fowler to promote its use by describing it as "a good plain word with no questions of spelling & pronunciation & accents & italics & genders about it...." Fowler had no use for the French employé, and he would be glad to know that employee appears now to be the invariable choice in British English. In the U.S., however, the ghost of employé lives on. Although employee is undoubtedly the usual spelling in American English, there are some publications and writers that show a preference for the variant employe, apparently out of deference to employé. The implication is that employee is in some way a corruption of the French term, but, in fact, as Fowler pointed out, it is a perfectly good English word, logically and formally consistent with other words of its kind. Employe, on the other hand, is a strange hybrid—spelled like the French word (minus the acute accent) but pronounced like the English one (rhyming with see rather than say) and used like the English word to refer to a woman as well as to a man. Employe aims to be a more logical and precise spelling than employee, but it fails on both counts. Its use is not incorrect, however. It occurs regularly in highly reputable publications, and it has clearly established itself as a respectable spelling variant in American English: • ... stemming from poor employe training — Wall Street Jour., 3 June 1980 • The employe ... maintained in the suit that he was threatened with dismissal —Washington Post, 5 May 1982 • ... 45 percent of the workers were office employes —Michael H. Brown, Audubon Mag., November 1982 • Employes have no legal standing to challenge settlements — U.S. News & World Report, 29 Aug. 1983 • ... is studying "cafeteria-style" benefits for state employes — USA Today, 23 Apr. 1984 |
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