Attorney General Plural

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. My name is Jake Danan. I’m calling from Door County, Wisconsin.

Hi, Jake. How are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I’m good. I was listening to the radio a little while ago, about two weeks ago, and they were talking about the attorney general and attorneys general.

And I realized that they, you know, obviously they put the S for the pluralization on the word attorney. But then a few minutes later, they abbreviated it, and they were talking about AGs.

So they moved the S to the end of the G. And I thought that was a little bit strange. I was wondering if you had any insight into why we do that.

Attorney General is one of those words that can be pluralized either as Attorney Generals or Attorneys General. And you’ll see style guides usually permit you to do either one.

But when we make an initialism or an acronym out of a word, we pluralize the end of the initialism or the end of the acronym. Now, that said, I know there’s a big argument in the baseball community that’s been going on for a very long time about runs batted in versus RBIs.

R’s B’s I’ve heard somebody say, which is ridiculous. It’s RBIs. But AGs is 100% correct. There’s nothing wrong with it. We just pluralized the final form and not based upon what it was descended from.

I’ve only ever heard attorneys general. So the attorney is getting pluralization. Why is that commonplace?

It’s just a stylistic choice that has been made before people really thought about it very much. So attorney generals, some people think of general as the noun, but actually general is an adjective describing the noun attorney.

And so that widespread misunderstanding that people pluralize generals and you get, it becomes habit and then thus a possibility in the style guides.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah. That’s it. That helps.

Cool.

Jake, thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye, Jake.

Bye-bye.

Just while we’re talking about it, other words that pluralize the same way, commanders in chief, sons-in-law, sisters-in-law, courts-martial, right?

But do you say spoonsful or do you say spoonfuls?

Oh, boy.

Three spoonfuls.

Spoonfuls.

Not spoonsful?

Three spoonsful.

Yeah, you can do either one.

You can do either one?

Yeah, you can do either one.

Phew.

Okay.

But when people say spoonsful, then they tend to make it two words and spell full with two L’s.

Yeah, I can see that.

Which is interesting.

Spoonsful with a hyphen, maybe.

Yeah, two spoonfuls of sugar.

Yeah, yeah.

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