One troop too few?

disentailment and disimplicature

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J: "But McWhorter was sort of correct that "troop" was not singular, except via colloquialization."

I don't think so.

For one, he was being a bit of a prescriptivist presumptuous one: "People don't use 'troop' in the singular". But they do! The OED records one use in 1832. Granted, it's scare-quoted. "The 'troop' was wounded. His name was Jim."

But surely scare quotes can be ignored.

Plus, it's like when with Kramer we discuss (slightly against Horn) about nand and nall. "These things don't exist in natural language", some claim. Except we use them, and we are not Martians.

So, it's like this karaoke CD I have. It's called "The One-Hand Clapping Company".

Surely, you may argue that if a troop, call it T, comprises just ONE person, called Jim. We can still say that Jim is a troop.

"Trooper" yes, but then, J uses -er for most things, or nster-, so J might just as well justify troopster.

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No. The point is about troop.

It's like my friend Murphy. He thought he had discovered a refutation of Grice. For Grice, "some if not all" is totally good.

But Murphy provided the example:

"Some, if not all, of the cows were culled from the herd".

"What kind of a herd is that with no cows in it?", he asked.

Similarly, one may argue that if a troop comprises ONE TROOP (called Jim) and Jim gets killed, the troop ceases to exist.

The problem with collectives is colloquialisation, as J notes. "Police". Some people say, "Police are", some prefer "Police is".

I have NOT been collecting 'countable' usages of 'troop' as per headlines: "13 troops killed in [insert name of dangerous town]".

For Russell, who set the paradox of the class that belongs to no class, if we take, 'troop', seriously, as the name of a colletive ("Troop" with capital T, as it were), we may symbolise it as:

T = {t1, t2, t3, ... tn}

I.e. a 'troop' (Troop) is like a universal. The 'troops' that comprise them are also called 'troops', or 'troop'.

But Grice has,

"avoid ambiguity".

And the critics of usage were saying that:

"16 troops killed in [insert name of dangerous place]"

is ambiguous in that

a) a collective is NEVER killed. It's like when you say, "The Reppublica di San Marino went to a party".

b) MEMBERS of sets get killed.

Confront with "Batallion".

--- 16 battalions killed.

meaning??

If each batallion comprises, say, 10 human-beings, then 160 human beings were killed.

Note that in order to say, "16 battalions" were killed the WHOLE number of the members of EACH battalion should be killed, which seems quite a disgrace, as report of an event.

----- (You cannot say, strictly, that a "troop" (qua collective) was 'killed' unless its whole members -- the 'troops' with lower-case 't' -- are killed).

It's like that film with Esther Williams, "School of sirens".

"School" is a collective for 'fish' (cognate with 'shoal', not with Latin scuola).

Surely if you say, "he killed a school of sirens", it means he must have KILLED ALL of the individual sirens forming the school.

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But I would argue that if the school just comprises ONE siren (Esther Williams), one COULD, strictly (although perhaps misleading) say that "The school is showing her derriere", or something.

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Collectives are on the whole a bother and should be avoided. "A pride of lions" is one of the most stupid constructions I've heard -- except I like it.

And recall what the Gricean collective for "Griceans" is because I haven't!