Today on the drive home on the van, we had a rambling discussion about postfix adjectives. These are the things with the noun in front, that sound wrong when pluralized. Examples are:<\/p>\n
Attorney General (Attorny General)
\nCourt Martial (Courts Martial)
\nSurgeon General (Surgeons General)
\nMother-in-Law (Mothers-in-Law)
\nAttorney-at-Law (Attorneys-at-Law)<\/p>\n
The only postfix adjectives we could think of were: general, martial, in-law, at-law, d’art. We were unsure if there were others, or if there was a proper term for the part of speech. We also couldn’t figure out why there is a hyphen between the noun and “at-law” or “in-law”, but not for the other postfix adjectives.<\/p>\n
We also noted that although in-law and at-law are postfix adjectives, outlaw is not. This led to a question regarding ellipticcurve<\/a>‘s sister C, who has passed the bar. C’s husband, D, has a brother J. If C did something illegal (such as littering) and left the state, from J’s point of view, would she be an attorney-at-law in-law outlaw?<\/p>\n We decided that (a) this is likely the fault of the French, who brought us Objects d’Art, and (b) it was a case for a forensic etymoligist. By the way, is there any connection between a forensic etymologist and a grammar nazi?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today on the drive home on the van, we had a rambling discussion about postfix adjectives. These are the things with the noun in front, that sound wrong when pluralized. Examples are: Attorney General (Attorny General) Court Martial (Courts Martial) Surgeon General (Surgeons General) Mother-in-Law (Mothers-in-Law) Attorney-at-Law (Attorneys-at-Law) The only postfix adjectives we could think Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[122],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lj-xfer","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}