Because English grammar does not call for pluralizing adjectives.
I’d agree with this if you changed “correct” to “accepted,” for the aforementioned reason. So many people violated what you call the “old standard” that dictionaries (which are based, of course, on usage) now list “attorney generals.” That doesn’t change the fact that pluralizing an adjective while leaving the noun singular violates English grammar, making it “acceptable,” but not “correct.”
Amusingly, there was in the 1980s a U.S. Army General – 3-star I think – hight General Serjan, the surname pronounced as a homonym of the medical specialty. He was due to make an inspection of the Army base on which my wife worked, and of course the rumor transmogrified that the Surgeon General was due to visit the base.
It’s always seemed to me to make perfect sense, given the actual meaning of the word – the attorney in charge of the legal affairs of a nation or state. To my way of thinking, “attorney generals” would be colonels (or Brigadiers in the U.K.) with law degrees who get promoted.
Hmmm.
On a related note - keep in mind that a commonly used (and presumably non-existent) word these days is “court-martialed”, as in “The Marine was court-martialed for his poor syntax”.
Shouldn’t that really be “courted-martial”?
d&r
People are not pluralizing adjectives. They are pluralizing the term “attorney general.” That changes everything. It is also part of a much larger process that also includes changing terms like courts-martial to court-martials.
From Google news:
There is nothing new about such simplifications in English. Probably thousands of words in today’s language that are not merely considered correct, but old and unimpeachable, have resulted from similar simplifying processes.
Whether prescriptivists like it or not, the difference between acceptable and correct in everyday usage is negligible. I couldn’t define a distinction between them that would last five seconds.
Just to forestall the inevitable: I am not saying that every mistake, solecism, or boner is automatically correct. English usage is always - has always been - a continuum. Where any individual usage falls on that continuum is almost always hotly debated.
I’d argue that attorney generals is now so far up the continuum toward correct that it is beyond argument. 
I believe the Associated Press usage I cited earlier to be an example. Presumably both the reporter and the editor found the term to look so correct and unexceptional that it never occurred to either that they needed to check the stylebook. That’s the working definition of correct.
My question about pluralization was partially facetious, but thanks for the triplicate response anyway.
You mean partiallys facetiou.
So an electronic media news script would likely be written with a reference to this book, I assume.
I appear to have evidence to the contrary 
In the US, I would think so. I know there is/used to be a UPI style guide out there as well. I would expect most style guides to go with the older, “attorneys general” usage.
That said, I personally prefer the sound of “attorney generals,” although I would try to avoid it in any very formal communications, especially written. But I do agree that it does sound a bit stilted and old-fashioned.
I don’t think Exapno and I are on different sides of this issue. I agree that words are correct based on what speakers of that language deem to be correct. “Attorney generals” is not incorrect in a general grammatical sense. It is incorrect stylistically when it goes against the style guidelines of whoever your target audience is. And most publications, newscasts, etc., have style guidelines, and my suspicion is the vast majority of them call for “attorneys general.” So, in that sense only, that form is “more correct.”
Yes, but it’s still interesting to see that English borrowed the phrase “attorney general”, keeping the original word order intact, all the while fully recognizing that the first word is a noun and the second an adjective. I would have expected this phrase to have been borrowed into English as a sort of composite noun, of which I’m not sure what the plural would have been.
That’s why I keep using the term “everyday writing.” Few of us are subject to stylebooks. The vast majority of writers of the English language are free from the restrictions of stylebooks. They don’t know or care about what stylebooks proscribe.
And stylebooks change regularly. Very soon the AP stylebook will recognize attorney generals as a correct usage. Guaranteed.
It’s instructive - and fun - to read the style guides written by Theodore Bernstein, former head copy editor of The New York Times. (My favorite title: Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears, and Outmoded Rules of English Usage.) He had to keep writing new books because the advice he gave changed so rapidly.
The one I best remember is an early book.
Balding. There is no such word. The word is baldish.
This is within my lifetime. Baldish has almost disappeared as a term since. (It’s not even in my spell checker.) (Google: balding 2,740,000 hits; baldish 12,300 hits.) When style and usage change that drastically and that rapidly, declaring common usages not to be “correct” or “acceptable” is laughable.
The question was about a newscast. Newscasts generally conform to a particular style. That’s why I’m pointing out in AP Style “attorneys general” is the correct form, because it simply is in that style. Also, a lot of us here at the Straight Dope do write for academic publications, school, etc., a host of other places where “attorney generals” would elicit a raised eyebrow. I don’t have the Chicago Manual of Style here, but I’m guessing they, too, would have a distinct preference to “attorneys general.”
Like I said, I have a preference for “attorney generals,” but it’s “attorneys general” if you want to be safe.
And, yes, of course stylebooks change. AP insisted on hyphenating “teen-ager” until the last edition. Most newspapers specifically ignored that rule. But I’m not commenting on what is common usage. My point is that if you have to pick if one is “more correct” than the other, the one that will elicit the least objection is “attorneys general.”
I’m not sure that “attorney” was a French word. Oxford Concise gives the derivation of the English word as follows:
So it looks like the English word “attorney” was not borrowed directly from the French, but is an English construction from another word derived from French. The position of “general” as the adjective behind the noun just seems to have been influenced by the French, but I don’t think “Attorney General” itself was a French phrase. (The modern French equivalent to “attorney” is “procureur”, hence the French title of the Attorney General of Canada is “Procureur général.”)
Plus, “Law French” was pretty much a hodge-podge - it wasn’t a formal language, subject to precise rules, but a mélange of English, French and Latin. See this famous passage, quoted here:
Which I think translates as:
“Richardson C[hief] J[ustice] of the Common Pleas, at Salisbury in summer 1631 was assaulted by a prisoner condemned for felony, who after his condemnation threw a brickbat at the said justice which narrowly missed. And for this an indictment was drawn immediately by us against the prisoner, and his right hand was amputated and fixed to the gibbet, on which same law he was immediately hanged in the presence of the Court.”
It looks to me like the author of this passage borrowed the vocabulary freely from French and Latin, and plugged the words into the general sentence structure of an English sentence, but the word order reflected the order of the language the words came from, similar to “Attorney General.”
Your quote says that “attorney” comes from “atorné” which is the past participle of the Old French verb “atorner”. I’ve never heard of this verb, it doesn’t exist in Modern French, but it seems to me that the phrase could have existed in Old French, if “atorné” was ever used as a noun. I have no idea if it was, but other English phrases containing a postpositive adjective have a word-for-word equivalent in French. You may find a few of them in [post=9370666]pravnik’s post[/post], or you can simply consider “governor general”, which is simply “gouverneur général” in French.
That agrees with what I’ve read (at least, what I’ve read is that it became that way when it started being used by people with no knowledge of French or Latin), and I’ll trust your knowledge of the subject.
An attorney general is a kind of attorney, not a kind of general. If you have more than one attorney, they are attorneys.
Well, that argument doesn’t work, because etymologically, lieutenant (captain) generals, (sergeant) major generals, and brigadier generals are types of captains, sergeants, and brigadiers, not types of generals.
The English language is inconsistent here. The existence of exceptions does not negate the possibility of a reasonable pattern in general.
I keep having this flash-back of when I was in the 7th grade, and a tall rangy nun (Sister Mary Gregory?) glaring down at me and talking about terms and pluralizing and such. I cannot remember what she was saying. :eek:
Peace,
mangeorge