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Perhaps it's become I come from arms-and-armor-land sometimes (where in period term usage is so fuzzy as to be useless and we need technical terms even if inventing or bending them), but I'm not so determined that 'phalanx' in a modern technical sense must map perfectly onto...
...the use in the literary sources. For me, the term 'phalanx' in a modern text, or a classroom, has the virtue of identifying two linked versions of a heavy infantry shield wall - the hoplite phalanx and the sarisa-phalanx. I tend to keep it there.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge in that space that the word 'phlanax' meant something a bit broader to the Greeks when they used it, just like the word 'longsword' is used far more broadly in medieval sources than by modern sword typology.
It's fair enough to adopt more precise terms, but I think it's relevant to stress that we are trying to describe something the Greeks themselves did not recognise as a distinctive thing that required its own exclusive label. It says a lot about the way we study the Greeks.
Caesar used it to describe Celtic and German formations. And, in general, amongst the Romans it had a non-technical sense (paper in-progress on this, actually). I don't know that in modern usage it needs to be a "heavy" infantry shield wall, but just a gathering of troops.
If anything, we should be calling these shield walls. It is more understandable to general audiences and - as it contains the world "shield" - portrays that this is a martial formation, and not some type of intellectual police tactics, as using a Greek word to describe it implies
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