J:
"As far as the slightly logical point, would you consider one person a ...gang itself? So...Lil G. shows up on yr street, representing for the....Q street boys. Just by hisself. You and yr homies see him out there: yo Lil G, are you in a gang? He say's yeah. So where are yr homies, Lil G? He says" I don't have any.Im the gang, Lil G of Q Street boys." Yd probably call the mental health authorities as well as cops. A Gang implies a collective group, plurality. Same for ...troop, I believe."
Well, 'gang', since you are into etymythology and like to focus that 'troup' is Germanic, in origin, so is 'gang'.
"Gang" is German, and I think it means 'go' in German-A 'go go' girl' is a gang-gang girl.
Surely there's nothing contradictory about ONE girl 'going'. A 'gang', literally.
My point is Griceian and Hornian, or something.
It concerns 'numerals', and the idea that it's very irritating to have the semantics of one's language depend on imprecisions like that.
Consider '1'.
Apparently, '1' was not a number for the Greeks (number = 'arithmos'). McLarty -- a mathematician -- explained that to me. "1" was the UNITY. We wouldn't say that an elephant has "a number of trunks" -- he has just one.
Still, I would think that it can be argued that '1' IS possibly a number.
McLarty irritated me further by pointing out to me that '2' was NEITHER a 'number' for the Greeks. It was the 'pair'. "3" was the FIRST number.
(Of course this was before the Arabs, who confused things further by saying that "0" is a number -- "There are a number of eggs in the basket." "What number?" "Zero eggs".
Cfr. zero-tolerance.
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So, my point is about numerals. Surely it would be odd to say that a 'gang' has to have at least TWO members.
It's better to deal with 'collectives' as 'abstractions' or logical constructions, alla Russell. It's a different "Type" (as Russell's theory of types indicates).
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So, we have a 'gang' which means, 'going' out. For some reason, when this word was first used, it was indicated that "a number" of people were going out, but that is neither here nor there.
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Most collectives are like that.
--- although I haven't surveyed them ALL. It may be that in SOME expressions of a 'collective', the thing IS entailed (rather than conversationally implicated, as I prefer).
So if you say,
"I saw a gang in the corner".
"Lucy?"
"Yes --"
"But she is on her own".
"So? That's what 'gang' means, etymologically."
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From online source:
gang--
O.E. gong "a going, journey, way, passage," and O.N. gangr "a group of men, a set," both from P.Gmc. *gangaz (noun of action related to *gangan "to go"), from PIE base *ghengh- "to step" (cf. Skt. jangha "shank," Avestan zanga- "ankle," Lith. zengiu "I stride"). The sense evolution is probably via meaning "a set of articles that are usually taken together in going," especially a set of tools used on the same job. By 1620s this had been extended in nautical speech to mean "a company of workmen," and by 1630s the word was being used, with disapproving overtones, for "any band of persons traveling together." Gangway preserves the original sense of the word, as does gangplank. To gang up (on) is first attested 1925. To come on like gangbusters (c.1940) is from radio drama "Gangbusters" (1937-57) which always opened with a cacophony of sirens, screams, shots, and jarring music. Gang of Four (1976) translates Chinese sirenbang, the nickname given to the four leaders of the Cultural Revolution who took the fall in Communist China after the death of Mao.
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in terms of language use your own descriptivist view would seem to imply accepting "gang" as a collective, not a single person, which is indicated by gangster (a member of a gang, like included...hey set theory, in brief!).
ReplyDelete"gang" is germanic/deutsch---as in walk, ie Gangplank, related to v. "gehen", to go ( "gegangen" gone). So yr correct that it's sort of awkward as well, and the use in English for "mob", or "group of criminals" fairly recent, but...English, ie anglo-saxonish has always been a mishmash, if not a mess (as one old philosophaster told me...). But at least in Anglo, it seems coherent to show a difference between the group, and the individual (as type theory would imply as well). Gang, gangster; troop, trooper; mob, mobster. Even if it sounds like piratenzunge to a native German .
As far as practical editing/journalist I think the preferred usage is service people, men/women serving in the military, or in uniform, perhaps soldiers. The use of "troops" is colloquial (tho' often used....but really "support our troops" seems to suggest, like support our groups of soldiers, or our teams, our gangs, etc)