If Your Neighborhood Has More Than One Cul-de-sac, It Has . . .

Although at its base a Germanic language, English is known for appropriating words from many languages. However, in the case of Latin, Greek or French borrowing, appropriation is not the right word. A great deal of Latin and Greek have found their way into English through the influence of science, philosophy and religion. And French rule over England resulted in many French terms finding their way into English, a history of French pushing into English rather than English pulling from French.

Many of the French words pushed into English were related to government, which includes the legal realm and urban policy. For an example of the latter, we have the word in the title of this piece, cul-de-sac. In addition, French words often denote more luxurious items when compared to their English equivalents. If I go to a restaurant and see a section of the menu titled “Appetizers”, I order the mozz sticks and tater skins. If the menu has “Hors d’oeuvre”, I get up and leave. I can’t afford the place. And, yes, technically the French word for “appetizer” is “entrée” and English mixed them up. Linguists call these “false friends”, when the foreign word in English is not used in the foreign language the same way. Still, the French for chic and English for blasé pattern is still demonstrated in spite of the false-friending of the culinary terms.

Grammar pedants love to show off their French with the political borrowing of “attorney general”. When the attorney general from each state joins their colleagues at a meeting, we have “attorneys general”. Or so demand editors or style guides or folks who like to belittle others. (I use “or” here rather than “and” because some editors are actually knowledgeable of linguistics and ableisms and the other -isms ableist terms intersect with. Many editors aren’t ones to be jerks about language, just nudging writers toward the preferred grammars of their style guides in order to maintain consistency of publication.) 

The thing is, the average person says “attorney generals” because English grammar will always pull away from French grammar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the “general” here is not a noun in that it is an adjective, a description, and French puts the adjectives after the nouns. A blue car is a car blue (voiture bleue) en français. But English doesn’t hear “attorney general” as an adjective and a noun couplet but as a compound noun, more than one noun tagged as a single noun in our grammatical usage. Think of the food “hot dog” or the US President’s residence of “White House”. So when pluralling “attorney general”, English grammar naturally encourages an ‘s’ be added at the end of “general” just like I would the multiple hot dogs I eat at the ballpark. Forcing French grammar on English speakers/writers is counter-intuitive in that our brains are intuiting the French borrow to follow English ways. 

Similarly with an in-law. If I have two sisters related through marriage, many English speakers will say I have two sister-in-laws, not the pluralling preferenced by style guides or editors or grammar pedants of “sisters-in-law”. Those who say sister-in-laws are no lesser in their language use. It’s just that the style guides usually want the French grammar. So us writers do it in the sheets but not in the streets.

There is no more clear example of the unnecessary energy of grammar pedants’ sadistic joy in “correcting” English grammar into French grammar than “cul-de-sac”. If you have more than one and you are writing for a magazine, they will likely request you write “culs-de-sac”. But no one I know will ever say that out loud. As someone who grew up in the cul-de-sac cornucopia that is an exurb, we all said “cul-de-sacs”. And to use the metaphor of the cul-de-sac, when coming across “attorneys general” or “culs-de-sac”, most people have to turn around and re-read it since it goes against the natural direction of English grammar. This demand for French grammar in English acts as a mental roadblock that doesn’t calm traffic as much as disrupts the natural flow of words in our English heads.

So the next time someone says “attorney generals” or “sister-in-laws” around you, as the women who run The Vocal Fries podcast put it, don’t be an asshole. Just let it go because it’s going as English goes. And if you are an editor for publications where you feel you have to change the English grammar to French, practice an ethics of kindness and anti-ableist awareness and just let the writer know that, yeah, folks say that and there is nothing wrong with it, but I’ve gotta change it per the style guide’s requirements. And when the moment comes to change the style guide, think about advocating in this case to just let writers write what they say. 

There’s a reason why suburbian dystopias use cul-de-sacs as ominous places where disturbing things happen. It’s as if the proliferation of them disturbs the natural flows of community building like the imposition of French grammar for culs-de-sac disrupts the natural flow of English communication.