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????
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface
at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
