Staph and Staff

I have a fondness for homonyms, words that sound alike.  Strictly speaking what I'm going to discuss today are mere homophones, words that sound alike but have different spellings.  There are rules for this sort of thing I guess, and some would insist on having their entrants be of completely different etymologies.  But the more word sleuthing you do the more common ancestors you turn up.

Consider staph and staff.

Staph, or if you are on less familiar terms, staphlococci, are a family of bacteria notorious for causing infections.  They show up under a microscope in cozy little clumps.  This gave them their name, which comes from the Greek staphyle meaning a bunch of grapes.  

Staff is a much more complicated word.  It may go back to an even older Paleo-Indo-European word, stebh.  The Greek word probably comes from this root, and incorporates both the concept of the cluster of grapes and the grape vine proper.

Other linguistic variants of the word cover assorted pillars, posts and poles including walking sticks/herding tools that we refer to as staffs.  

By the 1700's it became a term for a group of military officers who assist a commanding officer.  This is a German variation and seems to be based on the baton as a badge of office for the highest ranked officers.   Germany is the only nation in recent years to issue batons to Field Marshals but it used to be more common.  The Duke of Wellington supposedly held the rank of Marshal in the ranks of eight different Allied armies and got a baton from each of them to add to his two British ones!

The non martial use of the term staff to describe a group of civilian employees is pretty recent, dating to 1837.

On occasion the two words come into conflict.  After all, the last thing the people staffing your ICU want is....staph.

Random Internet picture of an ICU staffer.  Apparently from Tree Frog General Hospital.