Re: Missing Singulars

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> At 3:34:42 PM on Friday, December 19, 2008, Andrew Jarrette
> wrote:
>
>
> > --- On Fri, 12/19/08, Brian M. Scott <BMScott@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> >> It's not exclusively journalistic usage. A few minutes
> >> with Google got me the following examples, none
> >> journalistic.
>
> [...]
>
> > OK, but I think examples like the ones you have produced
> > are reflections of a tendency for people to imitate
> > journalistic usage. 
>
> I see no reason to believe that there even *is* such a
> tendency.
>

When writing (which is what is found on Google) rather than speaking,
sometimes people will use journalistic short forms to save time. "Ten
cattle" is easier to write than "ten head of cattle", even though in
speech they probably would say "ten cows" rather than "ten cattle".
Just my opinion, you probably don't respect it or agree with it, but I
don't think it's possible to definitively prove either my or your
opinion about this.

> > I guess I use more old-fashioned language.  I know I would
> > not use <police> in the cases of the examples you have
> > mentioned.  Would you?
>
> Probably not; if I were being that informal, I'd probably
> use 'cops', not 'police'. But my speech is in many respects
> very non-representative; I would never generalize from it to
> common usage.
>

So you and I are basically similar in our choice of words. When I
talk in general terms about English usage, I talk about what I have
learned, what is taught, and is therefore considered correct. If we
instead refer only to anything that is actually said, one opens the
door to anything that can be said, and then there is nothing "right"
and one cannot say "in English one says..." because there is a
multitude of possibilities, even what foreigners say when they are
speaking English incorrectly, or what children learning the language
will say before they are corrected (so one could say "In English one
says "I breaked it"). I try to draw the line somewhere.

> My impression from the bit of Googling that I did is that
> <two police> and the like is considerably less common than
> <two police officers>, <two cops>, etc., but it's clearly
> perfectly acceptable in some varieties.
>
> Brian
>

I don't know if I'd agree with "perfectly".

Andrew