b.c.a.g.
because my girlfriend and i are awesome, we spent a good swath of yesterday evening discussing a complicated grammar problem. we have no idea how to solve it, so we are asking you.
so let’s assume you have a boa constrictor, and somehow it is sworn in as the attorney general of your state. still following me? okay, good. now assume that that happens again - boa constrictor, attorney general - but in a different state. it doesn’t matter how this happened, and it doesn’t matter whether the respective boas are good at their jobs. every good snoot knows that the plural form of “attorney general” is “attorneys general,” but how do you describe multiple instances of attorney general that also happen to be a boa constrictor? the problem is that a boa constrictor is a compound noun (whereas “general” is an adjective that modifies “attorney”), so technically the plural can be either boas constrictor or boa constrictors.
POTENTIAL CANDIDATES:
boa constrictors attorneys general
attorneys boa constrictors general
attorneys boas constrictor general
boas constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boas constrictor
boa constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boa constrictors
etc. there are many permutations of this. probably only one, maybe two, are correct.
