How many troops in a troop?
Headline in today’s Washington Post:
Turkish Troop Dies; Kurd Rebels Trapped
My first thought: An entire troop of Turkish soldiers died? No - only one soldier. Or as the Post calls him, one troop - in defiance of longstanding English usage that a troop is a group.
Apparently this has been a growing (mis)usage for a couple of years now, though this is the first time I’ve noticed it. Give it another decade and you might see singular “troop” working its way into more lenient dictionaries; until then, the Post is just wrong.
October 29th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Yeah, the Post is just wrong. “Troop” is a collective noun. A single soldier is “a trooper.”