http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 4434#14434 ),
he and Arnold Zwicky seem to be getting their knickers in a right old twist over 'among the dead in one incident in Iraq today were two American troops'.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01923.html
I can't personally see what the fuss is about. They seem to be forgetting that if we needed to distinguish a group, we could always say [Two squads/platoons/regiments/divisions] of [troops/soldiers/US military personnel] or, indeed, Two dozen/hundred/thousand/?million troops/soldiers; and who's going to confuse this use with that in slogans like 'Support our troops'? What's wrong (confusing) about the new countable use of the (formerly?) plural noun?
Pullum defines a Boy Scout troop but neglects to define what 'a troop of American soldiers in Iraq' is exactly (in fact, he says at the start of his article that 'I'll tell you how that noun (troops) is in my variety of English: it's a plural-only noun that doesn't take cardinal numerals', which is a bit confusing in light of his later "discussion" that I just alluded to

Myself, I simply think that the exact number of people killed is what we are seeking to process, and it doesn't really matters whether we call this number soldiers, troops or a whole army of however many thousands of troops I mean soldiers I mean troops


This hardly seems anything like the experience I had in hearing that surgeries (meaning, 'medical operations') is an attested form in American English (it seemed to come as a bit of a surprise to Sidney Landau too, the editor of the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, and author of Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (Second Edition)).
I thought it was very odd that people were not simply using 'operation(s)' - He's gone into hospital for an (a...) operation/?surgery (on his...)/??a surgery > ??He's had five surgeries this year alone. But I would not deny that to say 'a surgery' or 'two surgeries' would be wrong; in fact, it is, when you think about it, quite logical and a good way to cut down on the number of words we need to use (or learn, if ESL students), and presumably the uncountable use is also (still) available in the lexicon of people who use the newer, countable form: Surgery/having a surgery is always dangerous. (That being said, I am glad sometimes to be British


Maybe some linguists know their language too well to let it go, to simply let and leave it be?