Don't forget your teethbrush

Arts minister, but art thieves. Drugs tsar, but drug dealers. When you put a noun in front of another noun, should it be singular or plural?
Why don't we call it a sport car? Photograph: John Dominis/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

We'd just taken our seats in a Vietnamese restaurant when my companion pointed at the menu and giggled. At the top of the page were the words "Wines list".

I giggled too. Then I thought: why is that funny? And is it even wrong?

A week earlier, in the course of my subediting duties, I'd come across two stories. The first one contained the words, "The exam board OCR has apologised for marking errors that affected GCSE and A-level grades. Exams regulator Ofqual said ... " In the second, the words "credit rating agency" and "credit ratings agency" appeared in the same paragraph.

What's going on here? Is change afoot?

There's dispute over the technical term for such juxtapositions of nouns. Some say adjectival noun, some noun adjunct, some noun modifier. I'll call them attributive nouns, in keeping with most dictionaries (you've probably noticed those entries that start "often attrib").

There's not much in the way of "official" guidance. The Chicago Manual of Style has it thus: "Sometimes an attributive becomes conventional in the singular (toy store), and sometimes in the plural (ladies room). Often we choose by ear and it doesn't matter (employee lounge, employees lounge)."

Some argue that the attributive noun is pluralised when there's special need for emphasis on the plurality: a schools minister, for example, is a minister for more than one school, whereas a bus driver can drive only one bus at a time. But that's obviously nonsense. How many flower arrangers do you know who arrange a single flower? Or shoe shops that sell individual shoes?

There's obviously no hard and fast rule. Why, then, do some constructions sound so wrong? Let's consider a few illuminating examples.

"Arms race" has been with us since at least 1936, but the reason for the plural form here is clear: an "arm race" conjures up a rather different image. A similar point applies to Antiques Roadshow (although at 33 years old, Antique Roadshow might not be such an inappropriate moniker). There's no such justification, however, for "weapons-grade" (1961).

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was sport that got the ball rolling. Sports car, sports bra and sports coat have been around since the early 20th century, sports day since the late 19th. Yes they're Americanisms, but their use of the plural was not gratuitous. Sport used to mean simply leisure, or fun (as in "make sport of someone" and "a good sport"). When its newer sense – a skilful, competitive activity – gained popularity, American speakers, not unreasonably, tried to maintain the distinction by keeping the singular for the first sense and using the plural for the second. Brits didn't follow this useful convention – but they were quite happy to adopt the attributive formations that followed.

A-ha, you interject. What about much older terms, such as batsman, swordsman and marksman? Well, yes. All solid, venerable English words.

But, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, these are derived from the genitive (possessive) form of the word, not the plural. Why no apostrophe? Because in the 17th century, the apostrophe wasn't yet widely used to denote the genitive or possessive; its primary function was to mark a missing letter or chunk of letters, as in fo'c'sle.

O-ho, you counterthrust. Who cares? What does it matter if we have a drugs tsar going after drug dealers, or an arts minister berating art thieves?

Well, it's not just annoying for subeditors. It's hugely confusing for non-native English speakers (and we do want them to learn our language, don't we, rather than have to learn theirs?), it's intellectually untidy, and it often forces you to search documents and web pages twice.

My personal feeling – not necessarily the Guardian's – is that whenever a new coinage arises, we should stick to the singular, unless there are very good reasons.

Then again, perhaps I should just mind my own beeswax. (1676. Genitive.)

Andy Bodle is a subeditor and writer who blogs at

Twitter: @Cotquean