I'm not native English and some work colleague and me were discussing about if saying human first or human-first is a correct English expression.
For example, we may promote that our company thinks of humans before machines so we might say:
- Human first. We prioritize human development, because we love our job. Customer satisfaction starts with our own work happiness.
It's just a sample sentence to provide an use case of human first.
Is it correct?
Thank you in advance!
Best Answer
No, it's not "correct" to say Human first. Certainly in any normal context it wouldn't be considered a credible "sentence". The nearest equivalent I can think of is...
...which is essentially an imperative command reduced from something like "Let women and children go first", or "Put women and children first in priority". Grammatically, the equivalent for human should probably be...
Note that the women and children version is idiomatically well-established, and actually means something in real-world contexts (emergencies such as a shipwrecks). In practice, OP's version is simply marketese (a marketing slogan), so it doesn't need to "mean" anything, or adhere to any grammatical principles.
It's also worth pointing out that syntactically, human is normally an adjective. It can be used as a (countable) noun, in which case in functions similarly to woman, child, person. I suppose given the way Toys R Us tramples over standard grammar and orthography, they could feasibly adopt a slogan such as "Child first". In language terms it would be "weird", but at least it might grab people's attention.