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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