One troop full of troops? [closed]

Question

A troop is a group of soldiers but when they say 32,000 troops they mean 32,000 soldiers, not 32,000 groups of soldiers. But one soldier is never referred to as one troop. What's up with that?

Answer 1

In some military forces troop is (or was) a technical term for an organisational unit of a particular kind. Obviously, the military forces that are organised into troops can be referred to as the troops. Over time, the troops became such a well established term for referring to military forces, and thus to the soldiers that comprise them, that people spontaneously started using it without giving any thought to how specifically a troop was defined in the relevant military terminology. It was then only a short step to using the term even when speaking of the military forces that did not, in fact, use the term troop for any particular kind of its organisational units.

That’s where the problems begin. When troop is a well defined technical term, it is clear that, say, ‘four troops’, means four units that are so called, comprising a large number of soldiers. But if the relevant military does not define the term troop, and the troops is nevertheless used as a loose term for the military forces, then one cannot meaningfully speak of any particular number of the troops. One can say that ‘the troops’ did this or that, but one shouldn’t ask how many troops did it. This use of the term is also incompatible with ever using it in the singular.

Now, what if one needs to say that a particular number of individual soldiers did something, while referring to them as the troops in this loose way. It would seem that one would have to say something like four members of the troops. Some people, however, seem to have found such wording too long and cumbersome and started shortening it to just four troops. The practice has so become widespread in the U.S. news-reporting that it now strikes many speakers of American English as unproblematic, in spite of feeling incorrect to those who think of the original meaning of the word troop whenever they hear it.

So far, the situation seems to be another case of the standard conflicts between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. The prescriptivists will decry four troops as incorrect when it stands for four soldiers, while the descriptivists will say ‘Look, respectable publications use that wording, so it is obviously acceptable within American English’. However, when there is a need to refer to one soldier while following the same pattern, even those who accept four troops are forced to recognise that something is amiss. One member of the troops cannot be shortened by just omitting member of, because one troops is grammatically wrong and one troop is not a shortening of one member of the troops. The awkwardness that we feel about this case is a reminder that we shouldn’t accept four troops, widespread as it may be, at least in the U.S.

(Incidentally, it should be noted that the whole problem disappears entirely if one says simply four soldiers, one soldier, etc. It is unclear why some people insist on using troops in such contexts at all. Perhaps that is because they perceive troops as somehow more formal, perhaps it is because they don’t know the precise ranks of those involved, and do not want to seem disrespectful by failing to recognise their ranks.)