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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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.

The Nouning of Back to School

I wrote about this a few years ago; here’s my updated report at Visual Thesaurus, using corpus resources that weren’t available back then.

Buckets, Boxes, and Bags

A recent discussion on the American Dialect Society email list concerned the conversion of fail from a verb to a noun. Grant Barrett mentioned that he had included it in a December 2008 article that he and Mark Leibovich wrote for the New York Times Week in Review. They had said:

Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!” (Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett, Dec. 21, 2008, “The Buzzwords of 2008″, NYT Week in Review

Arnold Zwicky wrote about the topic on his blog a little later, noting that in addition to the usage of fail as a mass noun, there were also some uses as a count noun (as in an epic fail). It’s the conversion of fail (and also win) to a mass noun that I’m interested in.

They Swim As Good As They Look

While I was out and about today, I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt promoting her high school swim team. On the front, it said:

If only we swam as good as we look!

Mouth Function!

This is Doug and Adam’s last week of school, so they’ve been bringing home folders stuffed with papers they never got around to bringing home before, and things that only come home at the end of the year, like their workbooks and journals. I was flipping through a journal-like booklet that Adam brought home, which turned out to be what he’d used every week for an assignment that consisted of copying several words in cursive three times each, then copying a sentence, and then copying the beginning of another sentence and making up an ending for it. The sentence start for one week in April involved a robot:

I bought a robot that was supposed to clean my room, but it mouth functioned, made a mess in my room, and blew up.

Adam’s teacher had simply put a line through mouth and written mal in red pen, probably the work of two seconds as she made her way through a pile of 25 booklets that day. I, on the other hand, stared at mouth functioned for a good minute, going through what must have happened to result in Adam’s creation of this new compound verb…

First of all, the /l/ in malfunction, coming as it does after a vowel, is pronounced as dark /l/, otherwise known as velarized /l/, written [ɫ]. That is, the back of the tongue is raised toward the soft palate (aka velum) as if it were on its way toward making a velar sound like [k] or [g].

Velarized /l/ is often perceived as another velar consonant in English, namely [w]. (Although the main thing you do to make a [w] is to round your lips, it’s a fact that the back of the tongue also rises toward the velum.) In fact, speakers of some dialects consistently produce [w] where others would have [ɫ]. So do some children who may eventually grow up to pronounce good velar /l/s. I still remember visiting my cousin Greg when we were four years old and him calling me Neo, i.e. [niw]. In the case at hand, [mæɫfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n] is liable to be perceived as [mæwfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n], and perhaps even spoken that way by Adam’s peers.

So Adam has in his vocabulary the word [mæwfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n], and now he has to write it to finish his sentence. How does he spell it? Mowfunctioned? Maufunctioned? Maybe. But he can tell that this word consists of function and some kind of prefix or independent word: [mæw]. What the heck does that mean? It’s certainly not a prefix he’s heard on any other words, or standing on its own (unless he’s caught me singing “Elvira”, going “Giddy Up A-Oom Poppa Oom Poppa Mow Mow”, but I try not to let that happen).

But wait, he reasons, maybe what he’s been hearing as [f] is really two consonants: [θf]. That’s reasonable: it would be easy to hear two voiceless fricatives next to one another as a single phoneme if you weren’t expecting them, or if the speaker wasn’t clearly enunciating. In that case, the word at the beginning is not [mæw], but [mæwθ] — mouth! This is a compound verb: mouth function. Of course, mouth function doesn’t make much more sense than malfunction if you don’t know the prefix mal-. But as with most cases of folk etymology, a little bit of sense is better than no sense; a word with a meaning (mouth) beats what is to him a nonsense syllable (mal).

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That’s So Disabled!

The good news: Adam has picked up some more of the language of his peers. The bad news: It’s the adjective retarded. The good news: He’s not using the word to insult people. The bad news: He’s using it to describe things that only someone with mental retardation could appreciate, as in That’s retarded! This usage makes sense only with the support of a presupposition that mentally retarded people like things that other people find stupid, but that kind of argument is going to be hard to explain to a kid. This is the same kind of semantic shift as happened with gay — from describing a person to describing something that only that kind of person would like, with the hearer implicitly asked to agree that gay people like things that other people find stupid. There are kids for whom this connection is so attenuated that they refuse to believe it, saying, “It’s not insulting to say something is gay! You’re not insulting a person, you’re just saying the thing is stupid”, and I’m sure I’ll hear the same kind of defense of retarded as a thing-describing adjective.

Hards On

After washing my hands in the grocery store restroom today, I was glad to see that their electric hand dryer had a feature I really liked: It had a paper towel dispenser next to it. (Glen likes this kind of hand dryer, too.) As I pulled out paper towels, I noticed that the hand dryer was the kind that you activate by pushing a button, not the kind that starts automatically when you put your hands under it. Even so, there were no instructions on the machine starting with “1. Push button” for someone to turn into “Push butt“. But as if to show that when one door closes another one opens, the brand name on the dryer was Hands On, and someone had invested some time and energy in gouging away part of the n with a sharp object, turning Hands On into … well, let me show you:

Ho ho! Very witty: Hands On is now Hard Ons! Wait, no — it’s now … Hards On?

Sinking Your iPod

Doug wanted me to sync his iPod yesterday so he could get some of the Monty Python sketches on there that I’ve been ripping from old records and downloading from iTunes. (At least, the Monty Python sketches that his mother is OK with him listening to.)

“OK, all synced,” I said as I handed it to him. It occurred to me that Doug and probably thousands of other kids had no idea that sync was a clipped form of synchronize, generalized from its meaning of coordinating actions to occur simultaneously to a meaning of making sure two items carry the same information. As far as he knew, the verb might just be sink, with past tense sank and past participle sunk. He’s only recently gotten much use out of the iPod he got a year or so ago, so I haven’t had the opportunity to hear how he forms the past forms, but I was curious enough that I did some Googling when I got back to the computer, and sure enough…

Some speakers out there aren’t sure what the past tense should be:

• Against my will (my friend didn’t like MY music..grr) my friend sunk (?) my iPod with her iTunes.
• So whenever I synced (sunk?) my iPod I’d have all my random musical shittings to listen to without really having to think about it much.

Others know that an irregular past tense for sync is a bit iffy, and explain it or highlight it as unusual:

• But the program wouldn’t transfer every song, so I was waiting until I could figure out how to get the rest of my songs on my new computer before I sunc (past tense of sync) the ipod.
• Another entry in the Buck Family Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language: sanc (verb, past tense), “to sync”, as in, “You sanc my iPod!”

Still others, as I suspected, use the irregular forms apparently with no idea that anything is amiss:

• last night when i sank my ipod i got the message to update the ipod software
• I did correct the album artist fields and deleted those comments and re-sunk my iPod and still those double albums appear.
• I made my own account and transferred all of my songs on it, it worked great but when i sunk my ipod it deleted all of my songs that i previously bought.
• Mel is gonna get Rose cuz she sunk my IPOD!
• i haven’t sunk my ipod for a long time for this very reason.

This innovation seems to be pretty new, since I only get a handful of pages, and most of the hits are from 2008 and 2009. However, it probably predates the iPod, since the iPod is not the first device to require syncing. The earliest hit I got was from June 2007, when I did a search for “past tense of sync” without including the word iPod, and found this mini-rant on a thread in a grammar forum:

Incredibly, people in my office use “sunk” as the past-tense of “synch” or “sync”. All day long, they tell each other (and our software users) that they “sunk” the data. “The data is sunk!”
Can they not hear how ridiculous that sounds? Because these of course are all computer scientists, engineers and database analysts, the question of how to offer an alternative or delicately point out that it’s bad P.R. to go around saying the system is “sunk” is a good one.

This irregularization of sync is a good example of folk etymology, or (because it hasn’t become fully established yet) an eggcorn: People misunderstand the verb sync, but you don’t realize it until they use it in the past tense. Of those who use sank and sunk as past tenses, probably at least some have created some abstract meaning for sink that makes sense, like thinking of the songs as being sunk into, embedded, in their iPods. I don’t see it in the Eggcorn Database yet; the closest is lip-sing for lip-sync(h). Remind me to submit it later today.

Of course, when I said that kids probably had sank as the past tense of sync and sunk as the past participle, I was being hopelessly unrealistic. What they probably have (and the examples above bear witness to this) is sank for both forms , or sunk for both forms , or sank and sunk in free variation. What I’d love to hear is a parent correcting their child: “You ’sunk’ your iPod? I think you mean you sank your iPod. Today I sync it, yesterday I sank it, I have just now sunk it.” Actually, it would drive me nuts to hear that, but it’s fun to imagine it.

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Who May I Ask Is Calling? Part II

So as I was saying, the voicemail system asked me

Who may I ask is calling?

a question that is syntactically ill-formed, and impossible to assemble a coherent meaning for if you’re going just by the ordinary rules of English syntax and semantics. My two hypotheses for the origin of this phrasing were:

1. It’s a blending of Who may I say is calling? and May I ask who is calling? I’ll refer to this structure as the embedded structure, since we have one clause (who is calling) embedded inside the main one (may I ask/say).
2. It’s Who, may I ask, is calling? with the parenthetical intonation worn down. I’ll refer to this structure as the parenthetical structure.

If only there were some way of knowing for a sentence like this whether the who at the front is the subject of an embedded verb or the main verb.

In fact, some speakers do make such a distinction.