Singular or plural?

Mon Jan 4 14:10:56 UTC 2010

My reading experience suggests to me that "barrack-room" is indeed a
Briticism, as is "barrack-room lawyer."  The U.S. equivalent has long been
"guardhouse lawyer," but "barracks lawyer" is also used.

JL

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 2:17 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Singular or plural?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Has anybody who has actually served as an EM in some branch of the
> military  within at least the past half-century heard "barrack-room
> (X)" used in the wild? In the U.S., a barracks was, before the coming
> of the "volunteer" Army, at least, a two-story wooden building of the
> shotgun-shack school of architecture, some dating back to WWI. The
> rough equivalent of a German _Erdgeschoss_ held the latrine. A tiny
> part of the first floor was closed off to provide a "private" room for
> the barracks sergeant. The rest of the barracks, first and second
> floors, was open space filled with, in basic-training units,
> double-decker bunks. After basic, bunks might or might not been
> double-deckers. In the gigantic, by American standards, brick
> palace-barracks taken over from the Wehrmacht, whether bunks were
> single- or double-decker depended on where, in the barracks, the
> Random Fuck Machine assigned you. The individual rooms in the
> barracks, which held as few as three (they held only two head of EM
> under the Wehrmacht) warm bodies or as many as God-only-knows, were
> called "bays" and not "barrack(s) rooms."
>
> Since the US Army had taken over the remaining 19th-c. posts left over
> from WWII, the Germans built brand-new, college-campus-style posts for
> the Bundeswehr. The irony!
>
> FWIW, I'd heard the term, "warm body" in its usual use, here and
> there, before I joined the Army. In the Army, however, "management"
> used the term to death. Hence, we EM didn't use it.
>
> Among L.A. power-plant human resources, ex-sailors spoke of the
> "turbine deck" and the "boiler deck." For us ex-GI's, it was the
> "turbine bay" and the "boiler bay." And everyone used "tur-bin" and
> not "tur-bine," which latter seems to be the ordinary pronunciation on
> the East Coast.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 9:58 AM, James Smith <jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       James Smith <jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: Singular or plural?
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Of course it's not quite the same thing because it's a compound
> adjective, but "barrack room" is fairly common; e.g., Kipling's "Barrack
> Room Ballads", barrack-room lawyer, barrack room brawl and so forth.  Might
> this perhaps indicate a singular noun form was once in use?
> >
> > James D. SMITH               |If history teaches anything
> > South SLC, UT                |it is that we will be sued
> > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com   |whether we act quickly and
> >                                    decisively
> >                             |or slowly and cautiously.
> >
> >
> > --- On Tue, 12/29/09, Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> >> From: Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject: Re: Singular or plural?
> >> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> >> Date: Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 6:32 PM
> >> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Herb
> >> Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >> > Strictly in terms of raw googits, for what it's worth,
> >> "barracks (was
> >> > or is)" gets 5 million; "barracks (were or are) gets
> >> 6.18 million.
> >>
> >> More evidence that this is a noun with identical singular
> >> and plural forms.
> >>
> >> > My
> >> > guess is that there isn't much difference in the
> >> frequency of singular
> >> > vs. plural uses. Â Without a determiner, as in "New
> >> barracks *was/were
> >> > built," plural is necessary, but with a definite
> >> article, "the Marine
> >> > barracks was bombed," singular works. Â Barracks
> >> belongs to one of
> >> > several classes of noun that grammars list as
> >> sometimes or always
> >>
> >> Sometimes or always?
> >>
> >> > taking singular verbs and allowing the indefinite
> >> article, but these
> >> > lists rarely include any explanation beyond possible
> >> membership, e.g.,
> >>
> >> The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has a pretty
> >> exhaustive
> >> treatment of this, p333-54.
> >>
> >> > diseases (measles, mumps, rickets), games (checkers,
> >> darts, quoits
> >> > (what's a quoit)),
> >>
> >> A quoit is a ring (about 10cm or so in diameter) often used
> >> for a
> >> ring-toss-like game.
> >>
> >> > miscellaneous other terms (barracks, scissors,
> >> > shears).
> >>
> >> Scissors/shears are different than barracks, because while
> >> you can say
> >>  "two barracks", you cannot say "two scissors/shears", but
> >> rather "two
> >> pairs of scissors/shears".Â  Scissors/shears are
> >> therefore plural
> >> uncount nouns, along with clothes, pants, munitions,
> >> etc.  They are
> >> uncount because they cannot be used with numbers.
> >>
> >> > A few years ago a graduate student of mine did his
> >> > dissertation on the treatment of words like these by
> >> different social
> >> > groups and found considerable variation both within
> >> and across groups.
> >> >
> >> > Herb
> >> >
> >> > On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Bill Palmer <
> w_a_palmer at bellsouth.net>
> >> wrote:
> >> > > In a story reporting the location of prior chief
> >> executives at times of =
> >> > > national crisis (occasioned by the recent attempt
> >> to bomb a NWA flight), =
> >> > > CBS reported, "President Reagan was on vacation
> >> when the Marine barracks =
> >> > > in Beirut were bombed in 1983". Â I would have
> >> used "was". Â But I don't =
> >> > > really know which is appropriate.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Randy Alexander
> >> Jilin City, China
> >> Blogs:
> >> Manchu studies: http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
> >> Chinese characters: http://www.bjshengr.com/yuwen
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------
> >> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org