Why we shouldn't call soldiers "troops," and why TNR.com needs its redesign back

John McWhorter makes the case:

Of course, a troop can also refer to a group of soldiers. However, there is also that quirky conventionalization, where one refers to a thousand troops when one means a thousand soldiers. You can get a dose of this barbarism daily in the news; as I write, here is an utterly typical example in the Times: 17,000 troops in Afghanistan. ...

The problem is that this usage of troops is only possible in the plural. One cannot refer to a single soldier as a troop. This means that calling 20,000 soldiers 20,000 troops depersonalizes the soldiers as individuals, and makes a massive number of living, breathing individuals sound like some kind of mass or substance, like water or jello, or some kind of freight.

Mothers do not kiss their troop goodbye as he takes off for Waziristan. [That should be "A mother does not kiss her troop goodbye..." - JAC] One will never encounter a troop learning to use her prosthetic leg. ...

Using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war. Meanwhile, it serves no logical purpose: it certainly isn’t clearer than soldiers, and in fact is less clear, because one may wonder whether squadrons are meant rather than individuals.

I agree. I had never thought of McWhorter's analysis before, but I've always preferred "soldier" anyway. For some reason, it just feels more direct, less glib and euphemistic. When did "troops" become so much more common than "soldiers" in the mainstream media that the latter term sounds odd even when it's literally correct? I don't know, but I'd guess it's a recent (within the past decade or so) development.

Tangentially, The New Republic (which hosts McWhorter's blog) unveiled a major redesign of its website yesterday ... only to change it back to the old design later the same day after the site crashed. As of this posting, the redesign still hasn't been restored.

TNR is my favorite political website and magazine, but its web design makes you feel like you're about to read the stodgiest commentary around. The site has several excellent blogs, but they look drab and indistinguishable on the surface. TNR's videos are hidden away with a tiny link, and they're not embeddable, making them unappealing to bloggers. Bizarrely, many areas of the site display a prominent link to "The Stump," TNR's presidential election blog (which has, not surprisingly, been defunct since 2008), but don't link to most of the site's curent blogs.

The site enables comments, but (1) not for the videos, (2) not with HTML, and -- most ridiculously -- (3) not with line breaks in the full-fledged articles. Oh, you can enter line breaks while typing your comment -- but they'll be stripped out once the comment is actually published. So what looked to you like a multi-paragraph comment becomes a single, mammoth paragraph to the readers, ensuring that it won't be read. Somehow, only the blog posts, not the articles, were able to accommodate the cutting-edge paragraph technology.

Let's hope TNR finally gets (back) a new web design worthy of its content.


(Photo, "Tank driver, Ft. Knox, Ky.," by Alfred T. Palmer, 1942, from the Library of Congress.)