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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

The word "small" in the HN headline ("Microsoft blames outage on small staff [...]"). I am not native English, but the image in my head was of the staffers being physically small. A bit curious how a native speaker reads it?

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As a native speaker I find the phrase "small staff" to be quite awkward and I would avoid writing it.

I'll also note that it's totally standard for the theregister.com to have headlines that incorporate puns or colloquial language. In this case the original headlines has "slim staff" which is also awkward but has a different mental image :-)

To this native speaker, the intended meaning was immediately obvious, but I agree, it is awkwardly phrased. Something like "inadequate staffing levels" would be much better.

It's on brand for "the register" whose editorial staff never miss a chance for a good pun or double entendre so the awkward phrasing is likely intentional.

This is a good lesson in clear writing, by the way. Take some documentation you've written and try to misunderstand it. Think about synonyms or think about the words in a different context and see how far you can run away from the original meaning.

For example - "original meaning" here is kind of strange. What if the original documentation is wrong or ambiguous? Then we don't want the original meaning, we want the intended meaning. But I'll leave it in here as an example.

Small as in few in number. Consider the phrase a “a large crowd”. Or its size if you take it as the aggregate size - I.e. population. That works too.

Small crowd, or small team, parses just fine. Small staff sounds strange.

In the UK staff is used much the way “team” or “employees” are used in the US. It’s a collective noun.

“Staff must park behind the building”.

As a native speaker that reads as: "Microsoft blames outage on small [number of] staff".

I'm not sure of the technical terms, but "staff" can both be the total mass of employees, and the individual employees.

"Small staff" means a small number of employees in the same way "small army" means a small number of soldiers.

Something, something countable vs uncountable nouns?

As an Aussie, yes the word "small" would indicate something about their stature. I would use the phrase "low staff numbers"

reduced, minimal, skeleton, insufficient, 'a small team'.

Agree with all, but 'small staff' does sound odd. I wonder if it's because of the alliteration. A 'great group' can also be confusing.

Agreed about sounding odd but "a small staff" sounds fine to me. I think the missing 'a' is what weirdifies it.

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