That usage is perhaps modeled after the East India Company. Each of its
directors was individually known as a committee. In point of fact, this
singular usage (one to whom something has been committed) is the older
one, and I would have said obsolete until you mentioned this example.
Karl Hagen
Department of English
Mount St. Mary's College
Beth Young wrote:
>Ah, interesting!
>
>The only analogous example I can contribute to this thread was created
>around the same time, but it has very limited usage. The Christian
>Science church pays people to serve as "Committee on Publication" but
>each committee is just one person. In other words, there's a Committee
>on Publication for Florida, one for Georgia, one for Alabama, and each
>has the official title, "Committee on Publication, MyState." I've
>always wondered whether this use of "committee" to refer to a single
>individual was a more common practice in the late 19th c, but I keep
>forgetting to look it up.
>
>Beth Young
>
>
>
>
>
>Beth Rapp Young
>http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung
>
>University of Central Florida
>>From Promise to Prominence: Celebrating 40 Years.
>
>
>
>
>>>>[log in to unmask] 11/13/2004 11:52:11 AM >>>
>>>>
>>>>
>In 1882, the calvery officially adopted the term "troop" to identify a
>group
>of soliders and the term "trooper" to identify the individual. Although
>we
>no longer have a calvary, my guess is that we still have "troop" as a
>shortened form of "trooper."
><http://www.nps.gov/prsf/history/glossary.htm >
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 9:47 AM
>Subject: Re: plural noun with no singular
>
>
>Nancy,
>
>Indeed "troops" has always been treated as a collective noun and still
>is
>(Today's NY Times: "U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force,"
>and
>my 10-year-old dictionaries show it only in that sense. What you missed
>is
>that newspapers and TV news reports now also use the term in a
>non-collective sense, as in "Over 1000 American troops have been
>killed" and
>"23 Troops Ambushed in Kirkuk."
>
>I suspect this was originally a convenience for headline writers.
>"Troops"
>is shorter than "soldiers" and covers all military personnel. The
>curious
>fact is that I have seen it used in print for as few as two persons
>but, to
>my knowledge, never for one. Bill McCleary's quotation from a soldier
>("You're a good troop") is an indication that this may now be changing
>as
>well.
>
>Dick Veit
>
>________________________________
>
>From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Nancy
>Downard
>Sent: Fri 11/12/2004 5:25 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: plural noun with no singular
>
>
>In my VERY humble opinion, the word 'troop' is in its singular form,
>HOWEVER, because it's a collective noun, it automatically refers to a
>group
>of something. You can have a single troop (one group of soldiers) or
>many
>troops (several groups of soldiers).
>
>There are many collective nouns out there that follow this same
>pattern, a
>herd of elephants (one group) or herds of elephants (more than one).
>Other
>examples, gaggle/s, pride/s, pod/s, etc.
>
>Am I missing something in the original post????
>
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