Perplexing Plurals

Imagine if you will a lovely little restaurant in a small Georgia town just outside Athens and the University of Georgia. Located on the main street of Watkinsville, Le Maison Bleu is excellent, or so I hear. I have never actually been to it, but many friends attest its tastiness. This I do not doubt because it exhibits the one trait absolutely required to be considered a high class institution: all the menu prices are listed as whole dollar values without decimals. Beware the supposedly fancy restaurant that still lists price to the .99; its glamour is likely less than the owner believes. (This is not to say that the food is inadequate at such restaurants. Some of the best food is found in little hole-in-the-wall locales, but it is nice to be pampered from time to time.) In any case, there you are, about to enjoy artsy sea bass lined with a drizzle of port reduction and a single asparagus atop it all when all of a sudden, a raging Frenchman storms through the door. Lest I give the wrong impression, let me preface this story with the fact that my experience with the French has been quite positive with the exception of one particularly perturbed receptionist. But regardless of my leanings, I certainly would not want to be in the way of this restaurant ravaging, beret wearing, thinly mustachioed Parisian. Indeed, this is one of the dreadful French elite (or rather, élite, for fear of upsetting him). He wreaks havoc all the way up to the hostess and demands to speak with the owner at once. Your dinner peace having been blemished already, you decide to listen in.

"Zis iz an outrage!!" the vituperative man exclaims.
"Please, sir, if you would like to discuss a problem, we are more than welcome to help, but let's do keep our voice down."
"Ah refuze to lo-ware ma voice when zis blazphemy haz been pearpatrated againzt ma language, ma country, ma-self!"
"What is the matter, sir? But please let's quite down."
"You zilly English rezt-ai-raunteurz, it iz not 'Le Maison Bleu'! It iz of corze 'La Maison Bleue'!"

You see, this man, scourge of France, is a member of l'Académie française, that accursed institution responsible for the destruction of the French language. To be fair, the man was right. Our friends in Watkinsville fell short, not even bothering to look up the gender of the main word in their restaurant title. This true story, recorded word for word by myself without a hint of exaggeration or stereotyping, shows how inflexible the French language is. According to this ridiculous group, new words acquired by the French are often discarded as "not French enough for French," thereby rendering especially useful words like le parking and le weekend officially defunct. Sure, they don't sound especially French (actually they do when pronounced by a Frenchman), but language is intended to change. English, for example, used to be something akin to German and Icelandic, completely indistinguishable from what it is today. But partially because of groups like the Académie, French is no longer the lingua franca of business and international relations (oh the irony), and English has stepped in to fill that void as America has risen to economic power over the past two hundred years.

All this being said, as I was beginning to write a completely different post earlier, I happened to include the word passerby in the opening paragraph. Ardent logophile that I am and being prone to jump from one thought to another at the slightest provocation, I thought how wonderful was the plural of said word. How often does one get the pleasure of negating all the usual grammatical rules for pluralization by inserting an "s" into the middle of a word to make it plural? Lovely. Despite the rebellious excitement that stirs in me each time I say passersby, it does actually conform to English grammar. The rule is this: one pluralizes nouns, not modifiers. By is merely describing the passers, and just as we would not say "the purples eggplant" to pluralize "the purple eggplant," so we should not say passerbies. This case, however, is fairly well known and many people would say passersby if they thought about it for a second.

What about these words, though: spoonful, cupful, attorney general? Although it is grammatically correct to say spoonsful, cupsful, and attorneys general, most people would simply add an "s" to the end of each word to pluralize it. In fact, I don't think I have ever heard anyone use anything other than spoonfuls. In looking around for interesting factoids, I ran across another fellow's blog talking specifically about football time outs and whether it was actually correct to say time outs or if it should be times out. While he concludes that time outs is correct, as do I, I disagree with his reasoning. He says that since it is a two-word construction, requiring both words to make sense, that you should just add an "s" to the end of it. I think his point is correct, but I do not think it holds for time out. I will explain using another example in his blog.

Earlier in the post he condones attorneys general as a correct plural since general simply describes attorney. While I think grammarians would agree, I do not. I am inclined to think that attorney general is actually a two-word construction, especially since we took the phrase from French as a single unit. If it were two separate parts we would not put the adjective after the noun in the French manner but would rather say general attorney. So firstly, I think it should be attorney generals because it is a two-word construction, and I think that is a good example of the rule that he wishes to apply to time out. But I do not think time out is the same since it is like passerby with two distinct parts that are logical. "Time that is out of play" = "time out" seems analogous to "passer who is walking by" = "passerby." So it makes since that "times that are out of play" = "times out" since "passers who are walking by" = "passersby." Therefore, I think grammatically it should be times out, but that makes absolutely no difference to me, because I like time outs better, and that is the point.

So after all this quasi-technical ado, it comes down to the fact that English is quite willing to change and the change betters our language. After all, football would seem utterly less rough and manly if all the announcers went around saying spoonsful, cupsful, and attorneys general (for they do often ramble to unrelated topics). "I would like two spoonsful of sugar in my tea whilst I wait for the attorneys general of the nearby towns to take their seats. Then we shall commence with this brutish game which I loathe to see. Viewers are certainly in for savagery today, Bob." So while times out may accidentally come out of the mouth of an announcer from time to time, I'm sure it will die out soon. And since "incorrect" grammar is definitely rough and manly, I'm all about it. As one wiser than I once said, "I love grammar," and I completely agree, but it's fun when grammar changes. Then maybe in five hundred years people will look back on our current tongue as a foreign language, just as we do on that of our forebears. Perhaps they will have an even more rebellious way of pluralizing time out. The thought gives me shivers.