Comments on: Soldiers or Troops?

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:21:15 +0000

I’m glad I’m not the only one confused by this!

By: Maureen

Maureen — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:01:42 +0000

The latest military word is “warfighter” (not sure yet how I feel about that one). But I also hate the use of troop to mean an individual, in part because it is most often used in reports of casualties in war zones. The quotes from Orwell and John McWorter are right on. The bottom line on troop is political, not semantic or grammatical. Headline writers and news programs diminish the humanity of our brave men and women fighting throughout the world when they refuse to report that “X number of men and women died today in {insert any number of regions].”

By: Herrin

Herrin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:05:14 +0000

Yeah George Carlin has a great part of one of his shows where he talks about the de-humanizing that happens when words are changed. For example he tracks the movement form “Shell Shock” through to “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Look out for him on YouTube.

Thanks for a great article that shows just how powerful words are within our culture.

By: Kurt

Kurt — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:10:03 +0000

Various translations of Psalm 18:29 leave the usage ambivalent “By Thee I can leap over/go against a troop…,” but one contemporary translation reads “You help me defeat armies.” The variety suggests that the original leans toward the plural.

By: Deborah H

Deborah H — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:29:38 +0000

I see your point, Levi. I tend to get excited when I see the word “troop” being used incorrectly, as it was in the text you cited from a military website.

It does not surprise me that someone writing on a military website would not know every facet of Army military history, or know specifically what a trooper is. I hope the writer was corrected, even if the text was not.

The armed services struggle in reporting, to use language that both the military and civilians recognize as meaning the same thing.