If an employee marries his bosses daughter, is it considered to be nepotism?

If an employee marries her boss's daughter, is it considered nepotism?

I think not, Asa. I see nepotism as merely taking place within the workplace. That is, if the boss hires his daughter or cousin or son-in-law, yes, that's nepotism. But just because the secretary marries the boss's son (or vice versa), I don't see that as nepotism. For example, the coach of the Lakers (Phil Jackson) married the owner's daughter. That wasn't considered nepotism.

Others may disagree, though.

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If an employee marries his bosses daughter, is it considered to be nepotism?

How come several bosses manage to have just one daughter between them?

The actual marriage would not be nepotism. If the employee then gained unfair advantages over other employees because of his marriage to the boss's daughter, then it would be nepotism.

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Originally posted by Richard English:

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If an employee marries his bosses daughter, is it considered to be nepotism?

How come several bosses manage to have just one daughter between them?

Not every boss will have a daughter. Some may have only sons, while others could be childless.

1) I think it should be bosses' daughter.

2) What does that mean? To me it means the daughter of the bosses - meaning that the bosses have produced (or adopted), together, a child. It wouldn't properly refer to a daughter of one of my two (or more) bosses, unless there are only two bosses, and the daughter is the daughter of both of them.

it means the daughter of the bosses

Its intended meaning is pretty obvious, but, in reality, it's just a typo. We all make them. Give the guy a break.

I make typos too. But the bigger point was #2.

[quote]If an employee marries his bosses daughter[/quote

An employee (singular) can only marry one daughter (legally) at one time. Otherwise, marriage to more than one is bigamy (as well as insanity).

That daughter is either the progeny of one boss (boss's daughter) or of a team of bosses [husband and wife] (bosses' daughter).

Technically, if the new husband were then promoted to CEO from company gofer, it would be nepotism. Other employees and stockholders could gripe about it but (unless there's a contract specifically prohibiting it) the boss can do whatever he or she wants.

But if the boss was a director of a government agency, usually nepotism laws would define exactly what hiring and/or promotion practice is not allowed.

Right now our governor is facing ethics charges because he hired his "niece-in-law" for a state job. Opponents waited five years before bringing it up.

As for "bosses," I just couldn't think of the proper possessive for "boss" at the time, so stuck in what looked right.

Stupid Asa, who needs to go back to second grade!

Interestingly enough, when I parse the sentence, it can only mean that there is one boss and one daughter. The Boss exists only in the singular for me, just like the wife or the cabin up by the lake. So, it's the Boss's daughter. No if it's hairs you're wanting to split, how come Latin nepos, nepotis, meant both 'grandson' and 'nephew' amongst other things, but in this case refers to the Boss's son-in-law? (Cf. decimate.)

Suppose the company is a joint venture of husband and wife. Each would be a boss, but together they would be "the bosses." Both could, and would, claim the girl as a daughter.

I am not totally conversant with the history of nepotism but it may have been that at some time hiring your nephew for a job he was not qualifed to do was the point at which other employees started grumbling. It was probably expected that a son or daughter would be unjustly advanced.

Laws have since codified who falls under that umbrella, but only in public service.

My experience with nepotism is that it is one sure way to ruin a thriving business. Your best employees won't stay if, despite their best efforts, a better job goes to the boss's dimwit son.

It used to be that nepotism didn't simply mean hiring one's relative. An essential element was that the relative NOT be qualified, or at least not the best person, for the job.

Most laws and regulations skip that element, because it is far too subjective.

But many very successful family-owned businesses practice nepotism (in the loose sense).

I've heard it said that JFK, upon appointing RFK to be his Attorney General, quipped that he wanted his brother to get some on-the-job-training before he went out to get a real job. I've not been able to determine if that is apocryphal or not, though. Certainly Congress was not amused.

JFK's joke, if it was told at all, wouldn't have bothered Democrats in Congress. Bobby had been lead counsel on at least one, perhaps more, congressional committees, including one in which he made an enemy of James Hoffa by investigating his connections to mobsters. He was as well qualified as many previous holders of the office.

From Wikipedia: Nepotism gained its name after the church practice in the Middle Ages, when some Catholic popes and bishops — who had taken vows of chastity, and therefore usually had no children of their own — gave their nephews positions of preference such as were often accorded by fathers to sons[1]. Several popes are known to have elevated nephews and other relatives to the cardinalate. Often, such appointments were used as a means of continuing a papal “dynasty”.

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But many very successful family-owned businesses practice nepotism (in the loose sense)

Quite. Certainly, nepotism need not necessarily be a Bad Thing.

I never expected that my joke about a simple typo would have created so much discussion!

The possessives of words ending in "s" cause problems everywhere and it seems to me the US English writers are especially prone to using eccentric plural formations. Interestingly, few have problems with words ending in consonants other than "s" - it seems it's the multitude of esses that result from such possessives that cause writers to seek alternatives.

The usual rule is simple enough:

The dog - singular.
The dogs - plural.
The dog's bone - the bone belonging to one dog.
The dog's bones - two or more bones belonging to one dog.
The dogs' bone - the bone belonging to two or more dogs.
The dogs' bones - two or more bones belonging to two or more dogs.

Plurals of words ending in "s" are made by adding "es" not "s", since they would otherwise not be pronounceable, but otherwise the rule is exactly the same. So, if we are writing about this nepotistic boss, we would form the words thus:

The boss - one boss.
The bosses - two or more bosses.
The boss's daughter - the daughter belonging to one boss.
The boss's daughters - two or more daughters belonging to one boss.
The bosses' daughter - the daughter belonging to two or more bosses.
The bosses' daughters - two or more daughters belonging to two or more bosses

I have frequently seen US writers use the construction "the boss' daughter" when they mean "the boss's daughter" - I assume that they pronounce the word "boss'" as "boss's" - but I'm not sure.

In truth, the construction "the boss' daughter" means s daughter belonging to several people called "bos".

Exceptions to the rule are few, but typically proper Biblical and historic names ending in "s" are made possessive by adding an apostrophe after the final letter, thus:

Jesus - singular
Jesus' disciples - disciples belonging to Jesus

I do not know whether the conventional system for making possessives - Jesus's - is actually wrong.

"The bosses daughter" incidentally, has no meaning I can discern - apart from being the subject of my joke Oh, I suppose it could be a newspaper headline line about someone called "The", who bossed his daughter about.

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The bosses' daughter - the daughter belonging to two or more bosses.

I read that to mean the daughter, together, of the two and only two bosses. Several can't have a singular daughter, though the four bosses can have a granddaughter.

On a related note, it has become extremely common for sloppy writers to use an apostrophe in creating simple plurals. Maybe I wasn't watching before, but it seems to have sprung up in the last 5 years or so.

Also, the use of it's rather than its is so common that some probably consider it proper.

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I read that to mean the daughter, together, of the two and only two bosses. Several can't have a singular daughter, though the four bosses can have a granddaughter.

Biologically you're quite right; grammatically the phrase is correct, even if it makes no real sense.

And I fully support your comments about the misuse of the apostrophe, as does the British group, "The Apostrophe Protection Society" http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/

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Biologically you're quite right; grammatically the phrase is correct, even if it makes no real sense.

If the two bosses were a man and a woman it would be quite possible biologically.

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Originally posted by Valentine:
On a related note, it has become extremely common for sloppy writers to use an apostrophe in creating simple plurals. Maybe I wasn't watching before, but it seems to have sprung up in the last 5 years or so.

It used to be a lot more common than it is now. The use of the apostrophe for plurals nowadays seems to be a remnant of this older tradition. See here

I agree that overuse of the apostrophe is rampant and that is why I thank god for "baby mama."

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Originally posted by Proofreader:
I agree that overuse of the apostrophe is rampant and that is why I thank god for "baby mama."

I have no idea what that means.

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The use of the apostrophe for plurals nowadays seems to be a remnant of this older tradition.

Had you said "resurgence", I would agree. The OCEL describes it as rare. These days it isn't, in my experience, and it is found more and more often in its #5 category (illiterate).

I'm tempted to ascribe it to a proliferation of the use of abbreviations (OCEL's #1), which do often look better with an apostrophe. Email, chatting and texting (all of which use abbreviations extensively) are now, for many people in the US, the most used form of writing.

I'm wary of conclusions based on impressions rather than data. Zwicky talks about the Recency Illusion (if you've noticed something only recently, you believe that it in fact originated recently) and the Frequency Illusion (once you notice a phenomenon, you believe that it happens a whole lot).

It might be more common now than it was 5 years ago, or it might not. We can't tell for sure until someone does the research.

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Originally posted by goofy:
I'm wary of conclusions based on impressions rather than data. Zwicky talks about the Recency Illusion (if you've noticed something only recently, you believe that it in fact originated recently) and the Frequency Illusion (once you notice a phenomenon, you believe that it happens a whole lot).

It might be more common now than it was 5 years ago, or it might not. We can't tell for sure until someone does the research.

I'm not sure about the Frequency Illusion, but as a proofreader for several community newspapers over the last two decades, I can say "it's" and "its" are one of the two most commonly switched pairs of words I come across. I have even found single sentences where the writer used both of them incorrectly.
The other frequently confused pair of words is "affect" and "effect". I told my editor at one paper if he came across either of those words in a story to switch it to the other one, and 90 per cent of the time he'd be doing the right thing.

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I can say "it's" and "its" are one of the two most commonly switched pairs of words I come across.

What is the frequency of inconsistency between number in subject and predicate?

I refer you to Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (link).

[Corrected link. That's what I get for having two keyboards in front of me. The link was left over from an earlier post on a different forum.]

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I refer you to Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (link).

is this link to "chipmunks" an example of the law? Or is Murphy involved? Or was this over my head?

After checking both links, I think Murphy is the odd man out.

The chipmunk link does seem a bit random doesn't it?

Try this one.

That explains it all. It's not only over my head, it's well beyond my extended reach.

I've corrected my error.

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If the two bosses were a man and a woman it would be quite possible biologically.

Indeed, but my sentence did say "two or more". Two would be possible biologically, but more would not.

Three would be conceivable. Sperm donor, egg donor and birth mother.

There is a recent news item about a woman giving birth to one black and one white set of fraternal twins. Thus two or more is, ummm, conceivable.

Isn't that splitting heirs?

Related to Hartman's Law, today's newsletter from "This Is True" has a correction in which Randy Cassingham says, " .... I recasted a sentence ..."

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This thread sure has taken off. This comment was made way up there:

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Stupid Asa, who needs to go back to second grade!

Asa, I won't let that one sit without a remark. You are one clever fellow, and don't let some typo make you think otherwise!

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I never expected that my joke about a simple typo would have created so much discussion!

Another example of British humor, Richard? I guess I will never catch on.