Being a Gators?
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The Sugar Bowl, where the Florida Gators shellacked the Cincinnati Bearcats 51-24, was a disappointment to me as a football game. But there was some added value linguistically. Pete Thamel's NYT article ("Sweet Finish for Tebow and Gators", 1/2/2010) quotes Tim Tebow: “I dreamed about being a Gators since I was 6 years old and it was better than I could have dreamed.”
Most American college sports teams have plural nicknames: in addition to the Gators and the Bearcats, this year's bowl games featured the Bruins, the Owls, the Hurricanes, the Badgers, the Falcons, the Vandals, the Wildcats, the Cornhuskers, and so on. And the names of professional football teams are also often plural: the NFC East, for example, comprises the Eagles, the Cowboys, the Giants, and the Redskins. But in all my experience of sports talk, I can't recall ever having seen a case where the singular form of a plural name or nickname retained plural morphology.
And the singular forms do get used a lot, for example in discussing where particular players move or stay. For example, this discussion of Mark Sanchez's decision to leave USC uses two singular forms with the expected singular morphology:
Sanchez ended up being drafted 5th and will be a NY Jet. It was the big sports talk this weekend and anytime a Trojan makes it to the league you gotta be excited.
I would have been surprised to read that Sanchez "will be a NY Jets", or that this fan was excited "anytime a Trojans makes it to the league".
Web search does turn up a few examples where the plural morphology is retained in a singular context:
Current senior Jeremy Criscione (Interlachen, Fla.) led the Gators to a second-place finish behind Arkansas. Criscione was the individual runner-up as well, recording the highest finish by a Gators since Keith Brantly won the event in 1983.
But this isn't very common. Are these just mistakes? Tebow might have misspoken out of excitement, and the scattered written versions might be typos. Or is this the leading edge of a new form of plurale tantum?
[Update — the interesting quote has disappeared from Thamel's article. But here's a screenshot from Google News, just to demonstrate that I didn't hallucinate the whole thing:
However, I should also note that several other scribes noted the same comment in Tebow's post-game press conference, and transcribed it in the singular, e.g. Dave Curtis, "Tim Tebow: To finish it off like this was special", Sporting News:
Q: Can you talk about the emotion of it all, your career ending and the tumultuous week for the program? And then tonight?
TT: It seemed like a little bit of a roller coaster. But it was special. It was a lot of fun. The relationships that were built, everything that we've done. My time at Florida was special. It was better than a dream. Honestly, I dreamed of being a Gator since I was 6 years old. And it was better than I could have dreamed. And this last week was tough, just dealing with everything and just worried about others around you and stuff. But, you know, it still was special. To finish it off like this was special.
A disappointment, linguistically speaking.]
[Update #2 — The post-game press conference is on YouTube here. The recording of the relevant part of Tebow's answer makes it clear that Thamel mis-heard (or mis-typed), along the lines suggested by language hat in the comments:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Sorry, folks, nothing to see here, move along…]
Bob said,
January 2, 2010 @ 11:28 am
This seems like simply a mistake. The only time I can recall seeing something like this is with teams like the Red Sox. I'm not sure if it's the alternate spelling, or the fact that socks come in pairs, or something else entirely, but I do sometimes see players referred to as "a Red Sox". "A Red Sock" does occur too, but I think not as frequently as it does with teams that have conventional names like "a Gator". Personally, neither "a Red Sox" nor "a Red Sock" sounds quite right to me.
[(myl) One important difference (aside from the spelling, and the fact that one person normally has two socks) is that names like "Red Sox" and "White Sox" involve metonymy rather than personification. The point is to figuratively wear the sox, not be the sox.]
language hat said,
January 2, 2010 @ 11:44 am
I don't know if we can be sure that he used the plural in any case, since the collocation "Gators since" makes it hard to hear the word boundary, unless Tebow made a dramatic and unlikely pause.
[(myl) Good point.]
Michael Lugo said,
January 2, 2010 @ 11:52 am
I've seen in writing "a Red Sox" for a single player on Boston's baseball team. Presumably this is because of the spelling; it's obvious that the singular of "Red Socks" should be "Red Sock". (Does "White Sox" work the same way?)
For "a Gators", I suggest the following origin: the article started out with a "a Gators player". Somebody realized the word "player" was unnecessary and deleted it, but didn't strip "Gators" of its plural.
And how does one refer to a single member of a team with a morphologically singular name? In American major pro sports, we have basketball's Heat, Magic, Thunder, and Jazz, and hockey's Avalanche, Wild, and Lightning.
Robert Coren said,
January 2, 2010 @ 12:38 pm
I've noticed that some Boston sportswriters seem to go to noticeable effort to avoid using the team name in the singular, using locutions like "a member of the Red Sox". But some of them don't, and in those cases, my subjective impression is that "Sox" outnumbers "Sock" by a considerable margin.
But I agree that the use of the plural when there's a recognizable singular form is strange, and probably unintentional.
thomas said,
January 2, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
Surely 'Red Socks' is different because each player has two socks: the socks are plural even when the player is singular.
Mr Punch said,
January 2, 2010 @ 1:22 pm
Pinker has addressed "Red Sox" and "Maple Leafs" I believe. These are somewhat different cases, but the bottom line is that "Sox" isn't about socks and "Leafs" isn't about leaves. Anyway, despite the "25 guys 25 cabs" canard, there is no singular of Red Sox.
neff said,
January 2, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
By the way, while the team is usually referred to in the plural when used attributively for their fans — e.g., Redskins fans, Giants fans — I've noticed that fans of the Chicago Cubs tend to go with "Cub fan" rather than "Cubs fan". I first picked this up from reading Mike Royko columns over the decades, and it still seems to be the idiomatic usage among people who are into the Cubbies. In fact it almost seems to be a shibboleth, as in, if you are a real fan you say Cub fan rather than Cubs fan.
Rubrick said,
January 2, 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Naively singularizing plurally-named group entities (such as sports teams or rock bands) when referring to an individual member can occasionally yield odd results. As a (deliberate) example, The Onion, in its Our Dumb Century fake retrospective, had as a sidebar "Who's Your Favorite Flock of Seagull?"
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 2, 2010 @ 8:40 pm
Almost off-topic, Polish has some borrowings from other languages, mostly English, where the English plural has become to be treated as singular in Polish, e.g. komandos 'a commando (soldier)', Latynos 'a Latino (man)', albinos 'an albino', fotos 'a pic', merynos 'a merino (sheep)', bongos 'a bongo (drum)', pornos 'a porn film', silos 'a silo', nius 'a piece of news', etc. Interestingly, this also applies to team/band/etc. members. So Tebow would surely be 'a Gators'. Just like Lennon was 'a Beatles'… This gives rise to double plurals along the lines of komandosi 'commandoes' and, informally, Beatlesi 'the Beatles', and of course Lakersi 'the Lakers', Gatorsi 'the Gators' etc.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 2, 2010 @ 8:59 pm
Actually, the above even extends (probably by analogy to Lakers etc.) to new, indigenously Polish, coinages, as in blokers, referring (derogatively) to 'a working-class youth living in a blok = typical communist-era block of flats'. The plural would of course be blokersi.
Rikku Hakumei said,
January 3, 2010 @ 2:33 am
A member of the Utah Jazz is often known as a "Jazzman." (Local media examples here and here.)
Ken Brown said,
January 3, 2010 @ 8:53 am
Jarek Weckwerth said: "blokers, referring (derogatively) to 'a working-class youth living in a blok"
How long before someone uses that as a false etymology for the English English word "bloke"?
The TV program "the wire" has characters saying "a police" where others might say "a police officer" or "a policeman". I have no idea if that is how people really talk in Baltimore, or generally in the mid-east of the USA, or just a quirk of the scriptwriters.
Dan T. said,
January 3, 2010 @ 11:03 am
I think the reason "Who's Your Favorite Flock of Seagull?" sounds weird is that the plural "Seagulls" is subordinated in a prepositional phrase attached to "Flock", which is inherently plural; an individual member might be a "seagull", but wouldn't be a nonsensical "flock of seagull".
On the other hand, back when the New Kids On The Block was a teen/tween craze, asking "Who's Your Favorite New Kid?" was a fairly reasonable query; "New Kids" was the head of the phrase, and could reasonably be singularized.
Dan T. said,
January 3, 2010 @ 11:05 am
Is the blowfish in "Hootie and the Blowfish" singular or plural? One fish, two fish, red fish, blowfish. (But "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea.")
[(amz) There's a wonderful new invention called the search engine, which is useful for answering such questions. About the name, Wikipedia says: "The [four-man] band's name comes from two of Darius Rucker's college choir friends, neither of whom was ever a band member. One, with a round face and glasses, was nicknamed Hootie because of his perceived owl-like appearance. The Blowfish, also got his nickname from his facial appearance, in his case chubby cheeks. Rucker is often mistakenly referred to as Hootie." So "the Blowfish" is singular, at least in origin. It took me less than a minute to find this information (none of which I knew before, though I had some recollection that there was something odd about the name); you could easily have done this yourself, rather than asking other people to do the work for you.
The band is most often referred to by its full name, and that is sometimes treated as grammatically plural (in line with the form of the name and with the fact that it denotes four men) and sometimes singular (because it denotes an entity); this dual treatment is not uncommon with band names that are plural in form. But the band is also referred to just as "Hootie", which seems most often to be treated as grammatically singular (the name looks like a singular noun and it denotes an entity), but sometimes as plural (either because "Hootie" is seen as a truncation of "Hootie and the Blowfish" or because it is understood as denoting four men).]