A Troop Is Two Boots on the Ground

Back in 2004, I blogged about noncollective troops — you know, 10,000 troops amounting to 10,000 people, not 10,000 groups of people. For Veteran’s Day I have revisited the subject over at Visual Thesaurus. It turns out quite a few writers on language have had something to say about troops, and I have to say that of all the pieces written on this subject, my VT column is one. Over there you’ll find a synthesis of what’s been said about troops in the 21st century … at least on the issue of what numbers can be used with troops, and whether one troop can legitimately refer to one person now. However, there was one kind of complaint about troops that was a bit different, different enough for me to cut it out of an article that was already running longer than I wanted it to. I’ll talk about that one here.

As I wrote in the VT column, “Some reject [noncollective troops] with any number; some allow it only with large numbers; some allow it with any number greater than one.” It turns out that there are some speakers who rail against noncollective troops when it’s not accompanied by any number at all. Why? I believe it has to do with another way of looking at noncollective troops: as a pluralia tantum noun, or in plain English, a plural-only noun. According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, some nouns are plural-only because they denote substances made of particles that are of themselves insignificant; for example, grits. The insignificance of the particles in nouns like grits taints some speakers’ feelings toward troops with the idea that it trivializes the individual soldiers. In a 2007 piece on NPR (also mentioned in the VT column) John McWhorter makes this complaint. It is echoed in Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, when she writes that the use of noncollective troops “is more than a grammatical error; turning a soldier — an individual with whom one may identify — into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think about war and its casualties in a more abstract way.” (p. 6)

Of course, I can’t argue with McWhorter’s and Jacoby’s feelings. If troops strikes them as trivializing individual members of the armed services, that’s how the word is for them. Nevertheless, I don’t think noncollective troops arose as a plural-only noun. To say that it did is to call the existence of the singular, semantically similar troop a coincidence. I think that what happened is the reverse of how my son and his peers (and others before them) decided that cleat was another name for a soccer shoe. Their shoes have projections on the bottom called cleats. Someone wearing the shoes is said to be wearing cleats. Someone who doesn’t know the word has to decide whether this plural refers to the two shoes (i.e. the two SETS of cleats), or to the projections on the bottoms of the shoes (i.e. the twenty or so INDIVIDUAL cleats). My son and his peers decided the former, and now talk about putting on one or both cleats. Thus, cleat has gone from being an individual noun to a collective noun. Troops, I maintain, went in the opposite direction. For someone unfamiliar with the word, does troops refer to the GROUPS of soldiers within a large number of soldiers, or does it refer to the INDIVIDUAL soldiers? If you choose the latter, troop has now become a noncollective noun.

Pictorially, troops was used as in the first picture below, then reinterpreted as in the second picture. Cleats went in the opposite direction.

On top: collective noun. On bottom: noncollective noun.

Another thought that occurred to me while I was writing the VT column was how troops is being subjected now to the same kind of disapproval as another collective noun that turned noncollective: people. It began as a collective noun meaning a group of human beings, but somewhere along the way was interpreted as a plural (an irregular plural but still a plural) referring to the members of the group. And, as with troops vs. soldiers, there were until quite recently complaints about the use of people instead of persons with specific numbers. For a more detailed discussion, see this post on Language Log. I’d guess there are several reasons we don’t (as far as I know) have one people meaning one person. First of all, people doesn’t have an obviously plural -s suffix on it that could be removed to make a singular. Second, people is generally taken to be not only an irregular plural, but in fact the suppletive plural of the singular person. In other words, we don’t need to make people singular; person is already its singular form. Neither of those conditions holds for troops; it has an -s suffix, and there isn’t already good singular form for what troops refers to: soldier (for some reason) is taken to refer exclusively to members of the Army, and member of the armed forces is too long.

However, now that I’ve become comfortable with the polysemy of troop, what do I do with a sentence like We put 5,000 boots on the ground? I no longer try to multiply 5,000 troops by some number of people in a troop, but I do still divide 5,000 boots on the ground by the number of boots per soldier. But I find I still don’t know how many members of the armed services we’re talking about when a newscaster says something like

We put about 5,000 boots on the ground.

So is that 2,500 soldiers? I know for some people, two boots on the ground are two (noncollective) troops; for example, a soldier in Iraq who wrote an open letter with the title “A grievance from a ‘boot on the ground’”.

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Nathan Bierma: The Complete Series

It’s a bittersweet moment when you see a boxed set of DVDs for a show you liked, like Freaks and Geeks or Firefly, and the subtitle says not “Season 1″ or “Season 4″ or what have you, but “The Complete Series”. On the one hand, you get the entire series! On the other hand, bummer — they can only say “The Complete Series” when the series is over, and they can only fit it into one boxed set when it got canceled after just a season or two. That’s the feeling I’ve been getting as I read Nathan Bierma’s The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English, published just this year by the same people who brought you Far From the Madding Gerund. (Yes, it’s another piece of blog swag: Editor Tom Sumner at William, James & Co. sent it to me personally.) Nathan Bierma was The Chicago Tribune’s answer to William Safire of The New York Times Magazine and Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe. I say was not because he’s dead (at least as of this writing), but because the column ran only from 2004 to 2008. The EEE is a collection of Bierma’s columns from this time period.

Bierma’s style is more like Jan Freeman’s than William Safire’s; as the blurb on the back from Erin McKean states, he’s “interested more in the ‘why?’ of language than the ‘don’ts.’” His background is mainly in teaching English, but he has a regular set of linguists, etymologists, and lexicographers that he calls upon to offer insights on whatever question he’s writing about, among them Grant Barrett, Anatoly Liberman, Mark Liberman, Erin McKean, Geoff Nunberg, Geoff Pullum, Dave Wilton, Ben Zimmer, and Arnold Zwicky. Some of the entries that I’ve found especially informative or insightful feature:

• five changes to English that were so profound that nobody should even think about complaining about the kind of stuff that they complain about now
• how even though anxious and eager are often used as synonyms, anxiety and eagerness remain strongly differentiated
• a comparison of back in the day and back in my day
• one reason raise the question is not a good substitute for the ignorant often-frowned-upon usage of beg the question
• a smackdown between Bierma and Martha Brockenbraugh, promoter of National Grammar Day and founder of SPOGG (Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar)
• a comparison of Hispanic vs. Latino (a topic often discussed in my family when we lived in El Paso, Texas)
• the demise of I’m all and the hand of I’m like
• a history of I’m good to mean No, thank you
• the semantic shift of journey to be almost always metaphorical
• a debunking of a stupid etymology of lost
• an easy-to-follow introduction to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• how pay one’s respects came to so strongly connote visiting a dead person

There is an occasional misstep. For example, in his entry for lay/lie, Bierma points out why it’s so hard to maintain the semantic distinction between them, but missed an opportunity to mention that it’s no coincidence they sound so much alike (since one was a causative form of the other in Old English). At least there was no misinformation in that entry. In the entry on the omissibility of that in relative clauses, Bierma says that as far as he knows, “there’s no clear guideline. It’s a matter of feel.” Well, there are some guidelines. For instance, the that has to stay if it’s serving as the relative clause’s subject (as in the bag that leaked). Worse, Bierma says that that tomorrow things will get better is a relative clause in the sentence I’ll tell him that tomorrow things will get better.

However, such errors and missed opportunities are (mostly) outweighed by Bierma’s modus operandi of “seeking out scholars who might have the information he’s looking for and then actually listening” (as Arnold Zwicky’s blurb puts it). What I found even more distracting was the organization of the book. Unlike a DVD boxed set, the columns in EEE are not arranged in order of publication. That’s not a problem: Chronological order doesn’t suit a format like a weekly column. Instead, as the title suggests, the arrangement is alphabetical, as in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, this arrangement doesn’t work so well, either. Even though the columns are broken up into bigger and smaller pieces depending on how much Bierma had to say on the various topics in them, many of the entries contain disparate items that (in an alphabetical arrangement) should have been separated. For example, there’s an entry on eon and dilemma. What do these words have in common? Are they part of some idiom? Are they easily confused? Either of those possibilities would have been news to me. Instead, it was just that one Greek reader had asked about them both, as loan words from Greek whose English meaning differed from the Greek. If they had to share an entry, maybe it could have been on Greek loan words. Another example is the entry February and jewelry. They’re together because one of Bierma’s readers vented two peeves in one letter: the pronunciations “Feb-yuary” and “joolery.” Thank goodness for the index.

Other peculiarities arise from the attempt to force a collection of columns into an encyclopedia format. One column was about Erin McKean and her work on the downloadable version of The New Oxford American Dictionary, but instead of just being presented as a (perhaps lightly revised) version of a column Bierma wrote, it’s shoved between entries on diagramming sentences and did you not, and labeled dictionaries, coexistence of handheld technologies. Many times a column that was clearly a book review appears under some heading like this, which can be deceptive. For example, an entry labeled pedantry, history and misguidedness of is really a review of David Crystal’s book The Fight for English: How the Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. The label led me to expect something more general and inclusive than just what was in Crystal’s book. In fact, this is a complaint about the entire book: Encyclopedia suggests a comprehensive (or at least systematic) survey of some field of knowledge, but EEE actually just covers the topics that Nathan Bierma happened to write about in his column.

In other entries, the attempts to scrub the entries of their dates to make them more timeless seem pointless. When Bierma says, “Here in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, I lined up along the motorcade route to pay my respects as President Gerald Ford’s funeral procession passed by,” why not just say, “In December 2006,” or just give the column’s publication date and go with the more natural “Last week”? The same goes for the book reviews that no longer coincide with the book’s publication, and have to specifically mention the date. Sometimes the scrubbing is incomplete, and deictic references like “this month” survive, hidden in the middle of the entry, as in the entry about Eskimo snow vocabulary.

To some extent, I can understand tinkering with the format of a weekly column before putting it into a book. Jan Freeman tells me that publishers tend to be wary of books that simply collect columns, because reading them one after another can get tiresome. What I think would have done is to divide the book into sections of broad topics: human interest stories about particular languages, word histories, book reviews, language myths, word usage questions. These sections could contain entire columns or just excerpts, as the entries do now; the reviews and human interest would work well as entire columns, while the word usage questions would do better as snippets of the columns that address the particular words.

All that’s not to say that EEE is a bad book. It’s fast, easy, entertaining reading, and would be a good gift for people who like reading about language but may not have heard of Nathan Bierma yet. It’s just not so much a reference book as a language lover’s bathroom reader.

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The Keyest Concept

“The discussion we had yesterday,” I began, “was a reminder to me that language data is always messy. I was trying to show you a simple picture of how parts of speech worked, and you guys kept giving me words that messed up the nice picture I was trying to paint for you. Language was invented over thousands of years by millions of people, so there are going to be exceptions, and words that you can’t easily label as one part of speech. That’s just the way it is. The good news, though, is that the tests we’re doing here are tests that you can do on your own, so you can see how a particular word is behaving.”

“Yesterday was also a reminder to me,” I continued, “that you can’t rely on just one test to determine what family some word belongs to.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

“Hey, Doug, listen to this,” I said. “This guy’s writing about how different English is from related languages like German and Swedish. He says:

English’s Germanic relative are like assorted varieties of deer — anteloopes, springboks, kudu, and so on — antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

Doug and I were sitting in the front hallway of Adam’s school, waiting for his class to let out. While we waited, I was reading John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. (Not to be confused with Derek Bickerton’s Bastard Tongues; see below.) Now I understand that new FCC rules require me to notify readers when I’m reviewing a piece of blog swag — i.e. free stuff that people from marketing departments send to bloggers in hopes of favorable mentions or reviews. So I’ll say right now that I got this book courtesy of the publicity department at Gotham Books. And to make the existing record clear, I also received free copies of The Unfolding of Language and Forbidden Words, as noted in the reviews I wrote. I also got Grammar Girl’s first book this way, though I didn’t mention this fact in the review. Books that I’ve bought or borrowed myself and reviewed or mentioned include:

• Bastard Tongues
• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
• Dreaming in Hindi
• Just a Phrase I’m Going Through
• Biting the Wax Tadpole
• Um
  
• Word Myths
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (children’s version)
• The Power of Babel
  

That last one was also by John McWhorter, and I liked it so much that when I was offered a review copy of his latest book, I accepted right away. But, you ask, if I was so eager to read it, why didn’t I lay hands on a copy of it myself last year, when it came out in hardback? The fact is that I just wasn’t terribly interested in reading another history of English. I watched the PBS miniseries on it in the late 1980s; I have my own copy of Baugh and Cable’s history; shoot, one of the things that really got me interested in linguistics was reading the history of English in that World Book Encyclopedia supplement back in high school (which I’ve mentioned once). And if I wanted to read another one, I could borrow my wife’s copy of Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (though I’ve been warned that Bryson’s works tend to contain a lot of errors, and I see this one perpetuates the Eskimo snow-vocabulary fiction in its first chapter). “Untold history?” I thought. “No, it’s been told a lot.” But with a free copy, delivered to me, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

When I read the first page of the introduction, I suddenly realized that McWhorter really did have a different plan for his story.

Cheesy Toilet Dogs

I wrote on the whiteboard the familiar sentence I alluded to at teh end of the last post:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

“Linguists look at parts of speech a bit differently than how you’ve probably been taught,” I said. “They don’t look so much at whether a word refers to a person, place, or thing; or state or action; or what have you. They group them based on what kinds of places they can fit into.”

From there, my plan was to erase one word out of the sentence at a time, and ask for other words that could replace it, and then words that could not replace it, without using part-of-speech labels. Once we had samples of words that could and could not replace each word in the sentence, they would start to fall into families, i.e. parts of speech. However, doing this exercise with two classes of 5th and 6th graders was a reminder to me that linguistic data is always messy. Some of the highlights:

• For the second the, one student observed that you could replace it with nothing at all; that is, you could say, “…jumped over lazy dogs.” Other students said we could also do that with the first the, which led to a observation that words like fox in English need something like a or every in front of them, but others, like dogs, don’t.
• Another student offered cheesy as a replacement for the second the, and I put it on the OK list, promising to say more about it later.
• When we listed words that could not replace quick, brown, and lazy, one student suggested toilet, but I put it in the OK list. We speculated on what toilet dogs might be. Dogs that always drank out of the toilet? Dog figurines to put on the top of your toilet tank? Dogs that guarded the toilet? In any case, it didn’t matter that a toilet was a thing instead of a “describing” word: It fit in the slot, so it went in the OK list.
• Also during the investigation of quick and brown, one student suggested dead as something that couldn’t fill in the slot, since dead foxes couldn’t jump. But I pointed out that we could certainly imagine one jumping, and even say, “Last night, I dreamed that the dead fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• The same girl had a similar objection to shoe as a replacement for fox, and I had a similar response. And, I pointed out, it certainly wasn’t nonsense in the same way “The quick brown because jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• For over, the students suggested lots of other prepositions, and then again, one of them suggested replacing over with nothing at all. At first, I said no, on the grounds that to do that, we’d need a different jumped: a homophone that meant “attack someone.” But no: another student reminded me that jump could work just fine without the over to mean “jump over”, and I remembered elephants jumping the fence, checker players jumping their opponents, and Evel Knievel jumping canyons. So I had to leave a null symbol in the OK list for things that could replace over.

When it came time to put labels on the families of words we’d amassed, the students knew which ones would be called nouns, which ones verbs, which ones prepositions, and which ones adjectives. The category of determiner was new to them, of course. A theme I kept coming back to was that even within our families of words, there were different kinds. Some determiners, like a and that, were singular; others, like these and many were plural. So why did we call them all determiners, instead of having two parts of speech for them? Some verbs, like swam, flew, or ran, could replace jumped, but others, like tried and believed, don’t. So why do we call them all verbs, instead of having different parts of speech for the different kinds of verbs? More on that, I told them, in part two the next day.

But I never did come back to cheesy. I could just imagine Doug or one of his classmates saying months or years later, “What do you mean cheesy isn’t a determiner?! You told us cheesy was a determiner! You said any word that could replace the was a determiner!” Well, the classmate wouldn’t be saying “you”; they’d be saying “Mr. Whitman”, but you get the idea. I’d have to do a bit of repair work before I moved ahead into phrases the next day.

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A Predicate Has to Have a Verb?

About a month ago, I was reading a draft of a five-paragraph essay Doug had to write for language arts. I pointed out a couple of run-on sentences, and a minute later, he had separated them with periods. Then I moved on to the fragments. One of them was something like, “His brother, who wants the duke’s title.”

“But that’s a complete sentence!” Doug protested.

“OK, then what’s the subject?” I asked.

“His brother.”

“And the predicate?”

“Wants the duke’s title!” Doug answered.

I’ll spare you all the arguing that went on during the next half hour. Eventually, Doug grudgingly and still somewhat incredulously conceded that sentences could be packed inside larger things that weren’t sentences. The most eye-opening moment I had, though, was when I asked, “Is Nick the cat a complete sentence?”

“Yes!” Doug said. The subject was Nick. The predicate was the cat. Likewise, in the kitchen was a complete sentence, with subject in, and predicate the kitchen. “The subject comes first,” Doug told me, “and the rest is the predicate. That’s the rule they taught us.”

“I see the problem,” I said. “You’re right that every sentence has to have a subject and a predicate, but what you didn’t realize is that not everything is a sentence. Predicates have to have a verb, at least in English they do. If there’s no verb, it’s not a predicate, and you don’t have a complete sentence.”

“A predicate doesn’t have to be a verb!” Doug said. “They never told us that!”

“Well, what you probably didn’t notice on all the worksheets you did where you identified subjects and predicates was that the predicates all had verbs.”

Doug was furious with his previous teachers for having allowed him to arrive at this overgeneral definition of a sentence.

“Do you think other kids have this same misunderstanding?” I asked. “Or other misunderstandings about sentences?”

“Yes!”

“Hmmm,” I said. At the beginning of the school year, Doug’s language arts teacher had given me an invitation to come in and speak to her classes about linguistics when I had a chance. She didn’t even care about the topic; whatever it was, she’d find a way to connect it to the objectives the students were working on. She’s been doing Latin and Greek word roots with them, so I’d been thinking about bringing in an exercise in reconstructing words from proto-languages, if I could find one that didn’t require too much preparation work in phonetics. Now, though, there seemed to be a more immediate objective that I could give a linguist’s perspective on.

So it was that last Tuesday, I stood in front of Doug’s language arts class, asking how many had ever lost points on a worksheet or test because they hadn’t written an answer as a complete sentence. Just about all of them had. Only a few dropped their hands when I asked if they’d ever wondered what the big deal was, as long as the teacher had understood their answer. Then I moved to a different topic, and reminded them about learning about parts of speech in previous years. My question: Who had ever wondered what they were supposed to do with this knowledge now that they’d learned the eight or ten or however many parts of speech. They all had. My aim, I announced, was to take these two topics, parts of speech on the one hand, and sentences on the other, and fill in the missing material that connected the two. We’d start with a sentence they’d probably heard before…

To be continued

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October Links

A couple of posts on baby names. First, here are David Crystal’s thoughts on on when and why books about babies (and, I might add, advertising copy and articles in some magazines) refer to your baby as Baby, as if it were a proper name.

The other post on baby names is actually three posts, but it’s well worth reading them all. Laura Wattenberg of The Baby Name Wizard starts with a tiresome email I’ve received a few times, about a child supposedly named Le-a. It’s pronounced Ledasha, because “the dash don’t be silent.” From there she gives a really enlightening and well-researched argument on how this and other urban-legend names (you know them: Orangello and Lemonjelo, Eczema, etc.) are a covert, or sometimes not so covert, way of talking about race.

Hat tip to Ben Zimmer for the Wattenberg pieces. Ben himself authored this next article: A Word Routes post on the expanding set of un-verbs. Follow link there to the related article he wrote while subbing for William Safire. Below that article is a note saying that Safire would be away “for a few weeks.” Little did I know…

The Latest RNWs

Three more for the “Friends in Low Places”/right-node wrapping files. First, something I heard on All Things Considered one day during the summer:

…attempting to recruit, train, and deploy diplomats to the world’s hot spots.
(NPR, All Things Considered, summer 2009)

You don’t recruit people to a place; you recruit them to an organization. And you don’t train them to a place, either. So the intended meaning is recruiting diplomats, training them, and deploying them to the world’s hot spots. A clear case of RNW.

Second, from my wife’s description of a dream she had one night:

We were selecting and selling wine to restaurants.

You don’t select wine to restaurants. Intended reading: selecting wine, and selling it to restaurants.

Lastly, something I read in a resume a friend asked me to read:

Cofounder and owner of a small consulting firm for 15 years

The cofounding didn’t take place over 15 years; just the owning did. Unlike most of the other RNWs I’ve collected, which involve coordinated verbs, this one has coordinated nouns. The only other one with a noun that I recall is:

Tony Nadal, the uncle and coach of Rafael Nadal since he started playing as a youngster

Presumably, Tony was Rafael’s uncle even before Rafael started playing tennis, although it’s possible that he married into the family at just that time, and really was both uncle and coach for the same period of time. Returning to the cofounder and owner example, I see that the nouns are in fact verbal nouns, which brings them closer to the more typical RNWs I’ve seen. I could even imagine it rephrased as a sentence with actual verbs: Cofounded and owned a small consulting firm for 15 years.

Hate to Poop the Party…

Regular reader and Beatles fan Gordon P. Hemsley had a question:

I just came across the phrase “poop the party” (as in, “sorry to poop the party”). I’ve never heard this phrase before, but it appears to be a back-formation (of sorts) from “partypooper”. Google gives me ~55,000 hits, but many of them appear to include punctuation like colons and hyphens within the phrase.

Perhaps you could do better research?

There would seem to be a need for a verb denoting what a party pooper does. As I’ve written before, compound nouns of the form [Noun]+[Verb]+er/ing often give rise to backformed verbs, such as rollercoast, sightsee, arm flap, problem solve, serial kill, fence sit, and peoplewatch and underage drink.

Crack the Door

Sometimes at night, my wife will want to make sure that Doug and Adam aren’t woken up by the noise coming from our bedroom, so she’ll have me shut the door. We don’t want one of the boys walking in on us when we’re busy watching a movie or some of those TV shows I mentioned in my last post.

Still, she doesn’t want the door completely shut: She wants to be able to hear if Doug or Adam has any trouble, and of course the cats need to be able to wander in and out. Here’s where it gets strange. When she makes her request, she asks me to “crack the door” — when the door is already wide open.

I long ago got used to the idiom crack the door/window meaning “open it just a crack”, and not “damage it by putting a crack in it”. The OED has this as chiefly a US usage, with the earliest attestation from 1899. But in my English, you can only crack doors and windows that are shut, not ones that are open. The crack has to be the appearance of a gap, not the narrowing of an existing one. So who else out there can crack doors and windows that are already open?

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