I was supposed to have an interview this week with Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute about his new book called “Murder Your Darlings” that has all sorts of inspirational writing advice, but we couldn’t make it work because his company is operating on a skeleton crew, and he couldn’t get help recording. And then he said, “You should do a segment about the phrase ‘skeleton crew.’” So this one is for you, Roy! We’ll do that interview in the future.
The idea of a 'skeleton' crew started in the military
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, people started using the word “skeleton” to describe the bare bones level of staffing needed to operated in the late 1700s, and it looks like it started in a military context. The earliest examples are about skeleton battalions, skeleton regiments, skeleton squads, and skeleton forces.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that you start seeing people use the term in a business sense, and that’s also when the use of the term “skeleton crew” starts really taking off, at least according to a Google Ngram chart, which shows how often words or phrases appear in published books.
It also looks like the phrase “skeleton crew” is about twice as popular in American English as it is in British English.
You may have guessed from my reference to a “bare bones level of staffing” that “skeleton” refers to something that is bare. The concept of a skeleton crew seems to come from the older meaning of a skeleton as a bare outline of something.
The word “skeleton” itself comes from a similar sounding Greek word, “skellein,”...
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