3

One of the employees who were attendant at the meeting asked a question.

I am looking for an adjective for ‘the employee’ that means ‘who was attendant at the meeting’.

The best I could find was ‘attendant’ itself, but as an adjective it means ‘accompanying’ which is not exactly the same as what I want. Also, I am not sure if ‘present’ is the best choice in that context?

Sasan
  • 3,342
  • 3
    Also, it should be 'one of the employees'. – Heartspring Apr 22 '23 at 17:48
  • 1
    Also, it should be One of the employees who were... – Tinfoil Hat Apr 23 '23 at 03:45
  • 3
    @TinfoilHat No, in this case, the past tense verb should be singular because it pertains to the singular "one (of the)" rather than the plural "employees". See: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46040/one-of-them-was-were-you#:~:text=1.%20%22One%20of%20them%22%20is%20a%20noun%20phrase,is%20not%3A%20One%20of%20them%20were%20you.%20Share. – Deepak Apr 23 '23 at 11:05
  • @Deepak — No, not if we're talking about employees who were at the meeting. The relative clause agrees with employees: Of the employees who were at the meeting, one asked a question. See: “You're one of the only people” plurality – Tinfoil Hat Apr 23 '23 at 14:09
  • @TinfoilHat I can see your point. It can perhaps go both ways. The way the sentence is constructed, I will concede you are right, the plural sounds more natural. But if we were envisioning a meeting where not all the employees were present (say a special or off-site meeting), then the singular would be correct. I guess I would emphasise that with punctuation: "One of the employees, who was at the meeting, asked a question." Replacing "the" with "our" somehow makes it sound even more natural: "One of our employees, who was at the meeting, asked a question." English is a funny old language. – Deepak Apr 23 '23 at 14:59
  • 2
    @Deepak — We can always skirt the issue by reducing the relative clause: One of the employees at the meeting asked a question. Or we can remove the issue by rewording: An employee who was at the meeting asked a question. – Tinfoil Hat Apr 23 '23 at 15:32

3 Answers3

14

?One of the employees who were attendant at the meeting asked a question.

This is rather unnatural.

If you want an adjective, it should be "present":

One of the employees present asked a question.

Or if it doesn't have to be an adjective, you can do without one:

One of the employees at the meeting asked a question.

One of the employees there asked a question.

JK2
  • 6,553
9

This is a short expression that is apparently the best that can be found; it is as good as an adjective.

(merriam-Webster) in attendance

1: present at an event, meeting, etc.

  • Everyone in attendance voted in favor of the measure.
  • A number of celebrities were in attendance.
  • One of the employees in attendance asked a question.

(ref.) The gym was over half full (more than thousand people in attendance) and most of the people in attendance were white.

(ref.) The meeting started at 7:30 p.m. with five people in attendance

(ref.) The total number of people in attendance at the funeral home confirmed that the news of Mrs. Elberhart's death hadn't attracted much attention

refs

However, this acception of "in attendance" could be particular to AmE. For instance, the Cambridge dictionary does not mention the sense found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, nor does Collins.

LPH
  • 20,841
  • Oxford (as reported by Google search) gives ‘present at a function or a place’ as its first definition, confirming my feeling that that meaning is well known in BrE too. (To me it feels slightly formal, though.) – gidds Apr 23 '23 at 16:02
  • @gidds The result from using the link is only "to be in attendance" from Longman. (be in attendance (at something) formal to be at a special or important event. – LPH Apr 23 '23 at 19:11
  • Maybe Google shows different dictionaries to different people. For me (in the UK), it says “Definitions from Oxford Languages”; it defines only “in attendance”, and the first definition it gives is “1. present at a function or a place.” with the example “some 200 were in attendance at the fourteenth reunion” — no mention of formality. – gidds Apr 23 '23 at 22:19
  • @gidds There is no doubt then, it is known in BrE too. – LPH Apr 23 '23 at 22:33
1

Attendant works fine as an adjective. See Collins for the entry.

An attendant employee asked a question at the meeting.

or you could use the related participle 'attending'

An attending employee asked a question at the meeting.

Or use the related nomial form 'attendee' if employee is clear from context:

An attendee asked a question at the meeting.

All are not only comprehensible, but shorter as a nomial modifier than using the additional clause.

J D
  • 1,099
  • 1
    Note that "attending" gets an ideosyncractic meaning when it modifies "physician". – Barmar Apr 23 '23 at 16:53
  • I would find the first two examples unusual enough that I would guess it was supposed to be 'An attentive employee...'. – dbmag9 Apr 24 '23 at 13:14
  • @dbmag9 No doubt the language is bookish. You won't hear it in the county jail. But there's a difference in meaning between attendant (sense: one who attends) and attentive (sense: one who pays attention). Not all attendees are attentive, in which case you could say confusingly 'Not all attendees are attendant' if by attendant you use the alternative sense of attendant that means attentive. :D – J D Apr 24 '23 at 14:45
  • @dbmag9 Personally, it seems redundant to me in minutes to point out that someone who is asking a question at a meeting is in attendance unless there's participation from someone teleconferencing? The shortest way to tackle the minutes would be to say 'Bob asked a question' to be short and specific in the general case. – J D Apr 24 '23 at 14:47
  • @JD I understand the difference but I wouldn't call your examples bookish; I would call them unnatural and clunky. From a good native writer I would suspect an autocorrect or editing error; from a writer I didn't know I would suspect they learned English as a foreign language. – dbmag9 Apr 24 '23 at 22:58
  • @dbmag9 Well, you're certainly entitled to your impressions. All I can say is that modern English ranges from Shakespearean English in which place "visages are countenanced" to the Victorian elaboration of American authors like Emerson's largely semi-colon and colon cobbled-together sesquipedalia, to the curt grammar of Strunk, White, and Hemingway. The word is obviously in the dictionary, and given all of the British English literature I've read like that of Jane Eyre or Return of the Native, all I can say is it sounds perfectly natural to me to use attendant in that sense... – J D Apr 25 '23 at 15:29
  • "unnatural and clunky" is largely prescriptivist and somewhat ego-centric sounding, and seems to be ignorant of the vast range of dialect that English is subject to, from the constructions from Scots that bleeds into English, to Indian-isms, to literate constructions one often finds in obscure books in distinct language communities. – J D Apr 25 '23 at 15:31
  • I live on the Southside of Chicago, and cockneyed English sounds at times baffling unlike English at all, so it's very unnatural to me. But were I from London, I'm sure the idiom that I'm comfortable understanding from the housing projects here in the city would be equally unnatural. – J D Apr 25 '23 at 15:32
  • @dbmag9 In short, your idiolect is one member of a fuzzy group of a dialect which is one aspect of a fuzzy group of a language, so I'd be cautious drawing too much certainty of what unnatural and clunky is by presuming your idiolect is somehow more accurate than other peoples'. That's why usage panels are composed of many people, and not just one. Language is socially constructed knowledge. – J D Apr 25 '23 at 15:37