Dear work colleagues, let’s stop using this clumsy phrase

A colleague is someone you work with, so why the pointless prefix?

“Sorry, I can’t make it to the pub tonight. I have to go to a work colleague’s leaving do,” a friend tells me. This winds me up. It isn’t being deprived of the opportunity to sip a pint that frustrates me. Rather, it is his use of the phrase “work colleague”. For me, this expression is akin to the sound of fingernails being scraped down a blackboard.

Here is the definition of colleague from the Collins English Dictionary: “a fellow worker or member of a staff, department, profession, etc”. And here is the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: “A person with whom one works in a profession or business.” So I think it’s safe to say that a colleague is someone you work with in some capacity. What value does “work” add as a prefix? None at all. It is mere tautology.

And yet we at the Guardian are as guilty as anyone of using this clumsy construction. In recent years, our newspaper and website have published “work colleague” hundreds of times, often in reference to office or relationship dilemmas, but also in news stories, obituaries and features. Here are a few examples:

• “Work colleague broke my phone but won’t pay for a replacement.”
  
• “A man has been found guilty of murdering a work colleague who became his lover.”
• “She was hugely respected by her work colleagues and touched many lives.”
• “I became obsessed with a work colleague and was devastated when she refused to go out with me. Six years on, I’m still hurting.”

And perhaps most bizarrely:

• “Witnessing a work colleague’s thigh fuzz isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

The Guardian has printed the term 117 times in the past five years, while the Observer, with its 10 times in five years, is less of an offender. It is odd that such examples have made it into our newspapers, where the editing process can be more rigorous and space more limited than on a website. Even stranger is that, when a reader has written in with a dilemma, there are instances where their letter does not contain the prefix but the accompanying headline or caption does. Sometimes, of course, one of my fellow subeditors may insert an extra word to fill out a line. But this can be no defence for writing “work colleague”. Among my pet hates, it is worse than a misplaced apostrophe and clumsier than using “women” as an adjective.

Colleague is a perfectly good word – better than “co-worker” or “member of my team”, more egalitarian than “boss”, “manager” or “employee”. It is capable of standing on its own, without the prefix. There are, though, times when “colleague” is misused. I have been waiting in a shop to pay for something, only to be greeted by the digital display on a vacant till telling me: “Please be patient. A colleague will serve you soon.” This I have no patience for. Call me a luddite, but I think an object cannot class itself as the colleague of a human. Here, “a member of staff” would have been better.

Perhaps in the hope that they will act in a more responsible manner, some colleges encourage their students to call one another colleagues. This would appear to fit the Collins definition (which we at the Guardian prefer) but not the Oxford one, which stipulates that the people in question should work together in a profession or business.

Generally, if you work with someone you can’t go wrong with the word colleague. There are times, when employed in a temporary bar job (as I once was), for example, when colleague may seem excessively formal. In such situations you could opt for “workmate” – though perhaps this assumes a friendship where there is none, or perhaps it may hint at the other sense of “mate”, a lover. (An Observer story in 2008 reported that “One in four Britons has had sex with a work colleague”.) OK, maybe I’m over-thinking things now.

I have, occasionally, heard people at the Guardian (usually those higher up the editorial chain of command) address staff as “comrades”, in what may be an attempt to play up to the Guardianista stereotype.

But I’m sticking with colleague. As for work colleague, it ought to have no place in a newspaper, so let’s drop the pointless prefix.

Toby Chasseaud is an assistant production editor at the Guardian. He tweets @TobyChasseaud

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