fellow

[Victor Steinbok]

There is something interesting going on here, but, of course, I can't
put my finger on it. Here's a line from E&P story on Cameron receiving
the Columnist of the Year award.

http://goo.gl/k11VW
> Cameron and his fellow writer, Cathryn Michon, were married Nov. 27,
> 2010, in Pacific Palisades, Calif. They spent a "working honeymoon"
> collaborating on the screenplay for the movie.

This seems to be a perfectly ordinary passage, but "his fellow writer"
jumped at me. I would have written "a fellow writer", and likely would
have corrected it the same way as an editor or a grader. But I could not
figure out why it bothered me so much. There is some overspecificity
here, but should it trigger a strong reaction?

I did a quick Google search for "his fellow". There is no way to analyze
all the hits (35M+), but I scanned the first 150 or so and there /was/ a
pattern. Save for one biblical passage ("his fellow servant"), /every
single hit/ showed this combination modifying a plural. So it's "his
fellow soldiers", "his fellow Democrats", etc. Not one singular noun.

It would be an overstatement that this is the whole story. Adding common
singular nouns to "his fellow" (soldier, writer, robot, student) gets
quite a few hits, although it's two orders of magnitude lower and
includes both singular and plural versions (unlike GB, the main Google
engine knows that they are related). But, the point is, there are cases
of "his fellow" with singular nouns. They are just not showing up near
the top of Google search.

Are there any usage notes on this? Any related/relevant observations? Or
am I just nitpicking again?

     VS-)

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