It makes me think of a machine, not a person. I prefer to just use “staff”
Comment on Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoWhat’s wrong with “server”? They serve you food, much like a computer server serves files.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
itslola@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Yeah, I tend to use “staff” or sometimes “waitstaff” to describe them, particularly in cafes, where the owner and/or manager might also be waiting tables. “Waiter” or “waitress” I’d mostly use when recounting something that happened while eating out, and I’m trying to specify who’s who in the story.
itslola@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Hmmm, well, the “wait” in waiter/waitress/waitstaff refers to the act of serving someone, usually in a restaurant or cafe. (dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/…/wait-on?top….) Like a lot of words in English, “wait” has more than one meaning.
There’s nothing wrong with “server”, per se, other than that we already had an established set of words for that role, and a server was also an existing word for a piece of IT equipment prior to US vernacular shifting (somewhere between the 90s and the 2010s, I think - we’ve always had a lot of US media pumped into Australia, but the vocab used to align on this one when I was a kid, and then at some point it changed).
Not saying Americans should do things the way we do it (vive la difference), just that the linguistic shift still throws me off. It would probably confuse me less if you’d always called them servers.