A Single Troop

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello. This is June Pekia from Encinitas.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I’ve been wondering for a long time about the use of the word troop in the news, newspapers and when I’m hearing it broadcast, instead of soldier.

The word troop is often used to mean one person, like the troop died. And to me it feels like that’s not the right word. It feels like it’s a lie. And I don’t know when this started to happen. It seems like it’s been a number of years. And I’m wondering if other people feel the same way about the word.

You know, June, it’s interesting. We get this question a lot. And I can tell you that I felt the same way about this word, that it just struck me strangely to hear people talk about one troop or two troops, something happening to two troops. But I have to tell you, I’ve changed my thinking on that. Would you like to know why?

I would love to know why.

Okay. You and I and everybody else grew up with the idea of troop as a group, right? Boy Scout troops. Maybe you were part of a Girl Scout troop. Maybe you watched the TV show F Troop. But the idea was always a troop as a group, right?

Right.

And a trooper is one person.

-huh.

-huh.

But you know what? Troop is often used that way in the military to mean one person. And you see instances of this back in the 50s, but certainly by the Vietnam era, you hear people talking about troop being one individual. People remembering being told, stand up in there, troop, meaning one person. And I think it’s complicated by the fact that, you know, you were talking about soldiers and not everybody who’s in the military is a soldier. Like if you call a Marine a soldier, then you’re going to get corrected. I’m wondering if the fact that we’ve been embedding journalists with the military in the last few years in particular might have influenced journalistic use of it.

Yeah, that could be. What about the actual meaning of the word itself? I mean, is it a twist from the original meaning?

It’s interesting. It comes from the French troupe, T-R-O-U-P-E, which did mean a band or a company of people. You could say a troop of performers or a troop of anything, cattle herders and that kind of thing. And then a person who was – and then once it got adopted into English, a person who was a member of that troop was a trooper. And so you have a trooper, a state trooper is actually a member of a police troop, right? And then you kind of get a little bit of reversing that. You get the clipping of trooper to become troop again to refer to a single person who was a member of a troop. And that’s where we get the confusion.

I remember being confused about this when I was very young, and it took me a long time to sort this out and try to figure out this usage because it’s kind of counterintuitive until you start to look at the larger context and realize, as Martha was saying, oh, hey, wait a second. The military, they’re the ones who do this the most. They’re the ones who use the troop by far and away the most. All of the branches of the military use this term to refer to an individual as well as a bunch of people.

But if you look in the various dictionaries that are put out by the military, you’ll find that they make some distinction. A troop is not an official designation for a group of people in the military. It may be an informal one, but it’s not an official one. Does that make sense? So you have C Company or something like that, but they won’t call them C Troop. I know we had the television show F Troop, but that’s a different story.

Well, I hope we’ve helped you some, June, have we?

Yes, yes. Thank you very much.

Okay, super duper. Thanks for coming.

All right, thank you. I look forward to listening to you guys in the future.

Okay. Take care.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a linguistic burr under your saddle, call us 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.