Weekend Wordery: Attorneys’ General or Attorney Generals’?
As purists and snoots never tire of pointing out, the plural of attorney general is attorneys general, not attorney generals. But if that’s right, how do you form the plural possessive? Is it possible (a) to clearly convey the idea of possession by attorneys general, and simultaneously (b) to avoid sounding dumb?
Law professor Mark Hall takes a stab at it (in the title of an otherwise commendable piece about the bogus legal claims of the states challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act) with the ill-considered phrase Attorneys General’s.
Now, I’m inclined to think there’s not a right answer here and that there are a few ways you could go. I just don’t see how Attorneys General’s could be one of those ways. I suppose it satisfies the first criterion—it may even be, in some twisted way, correct. But, to my ears, it sure sounds dumb. So let’s explore some alternatives.
Imagine hearing someone utter the following sounds:
The attorneys general argument was bogus.
Hearing that, you’d probably think the speaker was referring to the general argument of one attorney: the attorney’s general argument. Or, depending on context, you might hear attorneys’ general argument. But even in a conversational context that was very clearly about an argument made by a group of state Attorneys General, you probably just wouldn’t hear it as the Attorneys’ General argument. That phrase just doesn’t come across in spoken English.
Part of the problem is that attorney general is not a phrase of English origin in the first place. Like many other legal phrases, it came into English from the French following the Norman invasion. The general part was originally an adjective modifying attorney. (In French, the adjective can come after the noun.) An attorney general might just as well have been called a general attorney. Think of it as meaning something like top attorney. We would have no problem talking about top attorneys or top attorneys’ arguments, but we would stumble all over attorneys top.
Another part of the problem is that possessive forms of title phrases are often clumsy. When the President of the United States has a plan, it’s the President’s plan—not the President’s of the United States plan, or the President of the United States’s plan. But the latter might not sound so silly in some contexts. Say, at a global summit, where there are lots of presidents. Or think governors. It doesn’t really sound weird at all to talk about the Governor of Georgia’s plan.
And for that matter, common usage includes phrases like the Attorney General’s orders and the Surgeon General’s warning. Aren’t these usages inconsistent with the way we form the plurals of these terms?
What seems to be going on here is that there are two different ways of parsing the grammatical logic of attorney general, and we’re applying them both at the same time. Steven Pinker writes, in his Words and Rules (excerpt here):
[T]he mind analyzes every stretch of language as some mixture of memorized chunks and rule-governed assemblies. How people pluralize an expression depends on how they tacitly analyze it: as a word or as a phrase.
Sometimes we parse attorney general as a phrase, with a noun (attorney) and a trailing adjective (general). Sometimes we parse it as a single morphological unit—like a compound word.
We parse it as a phrase when we make the plural attorneys general, and as a word when we make the possessive attorney general’s. This explains the Attorneys General’s mess—if you apply both parsing rules (first pluralize attorney; then make the whole thing possessive), it’s what you get.
The phrase-parsing plural (attorneys general) is the province of purists, those who still hear attorney modified by general. The word-parsing plural (attorney generals) evinces more of the common touch. But my guess is that we’re really all in the latter camp at this point. It’s just that attorneys general has congealed (among the highly educated) as a special plural—kind of like an irregular verb. Having accepted attorneys general, though, it’s not really clear how to apply other morphological rules, like the rule for forming possessives.
It seems to me that adherence to medieval phrase-parsing has become something of a liability here. Perhaps it’s time to let loose and say what comes naturally anyway: one attorney general, two attorney generals; and one attorney general’s bogus arguments, two attorney generals’ bogus arguments.
But does attorney generals’ pass the test? I think so. (a) It’s as clear as s’ words ever are (and it helps distinguish general arguments made by attorneys from arguments made by more than one Attorney General); and (b) reasonable, non-hypocritical people will not think you sound dumb—and that’s the best you can really hope for.
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[...] clinic at Organon. His subject: the plural possessive of “attorney general.” He tries every which way. But the problem is over-constrained. Law professor Mark Hall takes an stab at it (in the title of [...]
[...] clinic at Organon. His subject: the plural possessive of “attorney general.” He tries every which way. But the problem is over-constrained. Law professor Mark Hall takes a stab at it (in the title of [...]
[...] 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 [...]
I don’t why there should be any debate over the plural form of attorney general. More than one is attorneys general; there is no apostrophe because no possession is implied. They are multiple attorneys, not multiple generals. How difficult can it be? Also, the direct form of the title is general attorney. Attorney general is just a reverse form of the same thing. In English, the implied, i.e., direct, form is always used as the guide for correctness. So, the direct plural form would be general attorneys and the reverse is true.I rest my case.