Re[4]: [tied] Missing Singulars

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 62187
Date: 2008-12-19

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.

> 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.

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