Teaspoon

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Feb 5 23:18:11 UTC 2013


On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> I seem to recall that a high-school "grammar" textbook in the early 1960s decreed that, for a solid-spelled compound word, the plural -s belong at the end (thus, "teaspoonfuls"), but if the compound is spelled as separate words, then the logical earlier noun should get the plural ending:  so "attorneys general" and "mothers-in-law."

Probably where I got the idea that that's the way that teaspoonfuls v.
teaspoons full works, but from a high-school "grammar" textbook in the
early *1950's*, of course.


--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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