Education is not what you have learned but what you can still remember, and there are some today who remember from their second-year Latin that a “cohort” in Caesar’s Gallic Wars was a unit of soldiers. There were six “centuries” (100 men) to a cohort, ten cohorts to a “legion” (therefore 6000 men). A century, then, would correspond to a company, a cohort to a battalion, and a legion to a regiment. The bodyguard of a Roman general was also called a cohors. Because of the word’s history, some people insist that cohort should only be used to refer to a group of people and never to an individual person. In recent years, however, the use of cohort to refer to an individual rather than a group has become very common and is now in fact the dominant usage. Seventy-one percent of the Usage Panel accepts the sentence The cashiered dictator and his cohorts have all written their memoirs, while only 43 percent accept The gangster walked into the room surrounded by his cohort. Also, perhaps because of its original military and paramilitary associations, cohort usually has a somewhat negative connotation, and therefore critics of the President rather than his supporters might use a phrase like the President and his cohorts.
