Les Mots Justes

April 28, 2010

Austin Frakt‘s mom, through back-channel comments, lays her finger on the only really practical way to treat the plural possessive of attorney general: avoid it at all cost.

My wife Nina agrees and further buttresses the strategic avoidance paradigm by pointing out that the phrase bogus arguments of the attorneys general follows the way the plural possessive is formed in French. That’s fitting, since it was the French-speaking Normans’ conquest of Britain in 1066 that got us into this fix in the first place. If we’re gonna follow the French rule for forming the plural, attorneys general, we might as well follow their rule for forming the plural possessive: of the attorneys general.

I also like the suggestion of switching into acronym mode, à la the AGs’ bogus arguments—as baseball fans do with RBIs for runs batted in—though I’m sure purists will have none of it. For them, just as you can end a season with one RBI or 190 RBI, you can file a bogus lawsuit with one AG or 50 AG. Because sticklers are like that.

Stay tuned for the denouement of this gripping series about plural possessives, in which we’ll visit the “in-laws” and learn whether I’m totally wrong about attorneys general’s.

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