I got something from a leading UK media outfit. Please tell me what you guys make of this title:
"Soldier's troops plea to minister" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8289541.stm
I find the title to be troublesome even after reading the article. Perhaps it should be re-written as "Soldier troops plea to minister" if the word "troop" is to be taken as the verb in the phrase.
I'm perplexed by that usage myself. Perhaps the British has a special meaning for "troop" either as a noun or verb that my
Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary has not recorded or taken note of. These are the meanings on record:
troopFunction:noun
Etymology:Middle French
trope,
troupe company, herd, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English
thorp,
throp village — more at THORP
Date:1545
1 a : a group of soldiers b : a cavalry unit corresponding to an infantry company c plural : ARMED FORCES, SOLDIERS
2 : a collection of people or things : CREW 2
3 : a flock of mammals or birds
4 : the basic organizational unit of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts under an adult leader
troopFunction:intransitive verb
Date:1565
1 : to move or gather in crowds
2 : to go one's way : WALK
3 : to spend time together : ASSOCIATE
4 : to move in large numbers
None of these meanings fits the usage in that headline. Could it be that "troops" in that headline means the verb "presents," as in "Soldier presents plea to minister"? In any case, since that headline got us all scrambling for what it could possibly mean, I would rate it a bad headline. A news headline, after all, should be able to tell the gist of the news story in a jiffy, not make readers scratch their heads for what it means.
So why is this happening even to the news outfit of the supposedly venerable British Broadcasting Corporation?
Part of the answer may lie in the very recent news item below in the
Independent of UK entitled "Overseas students are better at English than the British." My attention was called to it by Forum member Hill Roberts in Spain only yesterday.
Here are the first four paragraphs of that story:
British undergraduates are nearly three times more likely to make errors in English than those from overseas, according to new research.
A study of written work produced by final-year students revealed that, on average, they had 52.2 punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors per paper compared with just 18.8 for the international students.
The research is disclosed today by Professor Bernard Lamb, reader in genetics at Imperial College London, and president of the Queen's English Society, after studying the written work produced in the year by his students. It will be published in the society's journal, Quest, next month.
Spelling errors included "flourescence" for "fluorescence", "alot" for "a lot", "seperate" for "separate", "yeild" for "yield", "relevent" for "relevant", "introduications" for "introductions" and "pail vains" for "pale veins".To read the story in full,
click this link to "Overseas students are better at English than the British" now.