e2pandas

She wasn’t ready.

She looked up at him and a surge of warmth hit her in the throat. She looked down again and saw his bags, everything he treasured packed neatly inside, sitting on the floor on either side of him. He was clutching his ticket.

She’d known it was coming. She wasn’t ready.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “As soon as I get there, I promise.” She smiled, intending to nod but couldn’t move.

A tear slid down her cheek. She wasn’t ready.

“Don’t cry, love,” he whispered, smoothing her hair with the palm of his hand. “You know I hate to see my lady cry.” He pulled her into his arms, knowing full well that she was wondering why he was leaving her, and he didn’t have an answer. He’d been offered a job – a good job – out of town, of course, and it was she who urged him to follow his heart and take it.

But she wasn’t ready.

He thought about all the other hard goodbyes that took place in that train station. Relocation. War. And those who, like him, were reluctantly breaking someone’s heart.

He held her for a long time; she silently hoped he’d change his mind. Something about the final boarding call came over the loudspeaker and she felt the blood rush from her face. He repeated his promise to call and added a second to return. He picked up his bags and turned to go; she shut her eyes and turned sideways.

Don’t turn around, she thought. The lady’s not for turning. But she turned around anyway, just in time to see him slip through the door and out of sight.

She shrunk onto the floor, her back pressed against the pillar, and sobbed uncontrollably.

She wasn’t ready.

I'm the last guy in the world anyone would consider to be a spelling freak or a grammar (whoops, almost spelled it with an "e" again) nazi. My love of reading the written word is long established, it's just that I'm not that stringent on how the stuff is actually written (my vitriolic hatred for instant messaging abbreviations notwithstanding). But sometimes I come across a certain grammar rule that never fails to bring a smile to my face and a little joy in my heart. One that I almost always feel the need to repeat out loud to myself and let the beautiful words roll off my tongue. This is when someone has to pluralize a postpositive adjective.

"Well what the hell does that mean, you weirdo?" you ask me. Well, a postpositive adjective is one that is actually placed after the noun it modifies. When you want to make something like this plural, it is proper that the noun is made plural and not the adjective. So when you want to say something like "I think that Edwin Meese III was the worst of all of our nation's many Attorneys General," it is correct to put the s at the end of Attorney, as the word General is a reference to the breadth of that job and it modifies the noun Attorney.

This rule then leads to pluralizations like:

• Attorneys, Secretaries, Surgeons and Postmasters General
• courts-martial
• brothers-in-law
• passers-by
• iPods Nano
• Coca-Colas Classic
• Volkswagens Jetta
• Robert Downeys Jr.

Why do I like this so much? I think it's because it sounds so utterly pompous (Such as in the Onion article about William Safire ordering two Whoppers Junior) and I always enjoy a chance to inject an absurd affectation into my otherwise low-culture life.

Recently it seems that this style is dying out, as much of the media seems intent on doing it the better-sounding (albeit incorrect) way by making the end of the phrase plural, no matter what kind of word it is. Indeed, I have even seen some dictionaries that list "Attorney Generals" as a proper alternative plural form

Join me, brothers and sisters, in keeping proper postpositive pluralization alive. Think before you place that "s"

DrSeudo says culs-de-sac! ne'ers-do-well! oscars the grouch!