Briefly noted. On the NYT op-ed page today, Daniel Engber counseling “Quit Whining About Your Sick Colleague”, with this along the way:
Those who whine about their ailing colleagues sometimes cite another field of research, that of business economics. It’s said that sick people in the workplace — so-called presentees, not to be confused with sick absentees, who don’t come in to the office — cost the economy at least $60 billion every year.
Presentee in this sense (‘(sick) people who come to work’) was (I think) new to me. But in discussions of staffing it’s obviously useful.
OED3 (March 2007) has two entries for the noun:
(a) having the common passive interpretation of the derivational suffix -ee (‘a person who is presented’ — in contrast with presenter), attested from 1576;
(b) as an opposite of absentee, so with the sense ‘a person who is present’, attested from 1892 — but at first only in humorous uses, and only recently (1998, 2005) with reference to staffing.
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