Human resources

An HR department rarely says in so many words that it is short of people. It says die Personaldecke ist dünn, and the picture does the work: the staff are a cover spread over everything that has to be done, and when that cover is thin, every gap shows. The idiom is fixed enough that its adjectives come as a small set — dünn, knapp, angespannt — and a manager explaining why a holiday cannot be approved will reach for one of them before quoting any figure. English says a team is stretched, or running on a skeleton staff; German keeps the blanket, and nobody hearing it thinks of bedding. The rest of this list shares the same habit of talking about people through the procedure that handles them: a post is nachbesetzt, staff are freigesetzt, and in the memo nobody is ever sacked.