Saturday, January 9, 2010

We have three, so it’s a valid question

My last post got me thinking: How does one make Brigham Young University plural?

As an initialization, it's pretty clear: BYUs seems the best way to go. But for the full name, Brigham Young Universities just doesn’t sound right to me, even though i figure that’s probably the best way to do it in the end.

The linguist in me gets overly amused, though, by analogizing from Book of Mormon > Books of Mormon and making the plural of Brigham Young University into Brigham Youngs University.

The only thing that would be better is if we decided that the university wasn’t named after Brigham Young so much as it belonged to him—then it would be Brigham Youngs’s University. Maybe even better: Brigham Youngs’s Universities.

Right? Right? Hey, where’d everybody go?

1 comment:

Heather the Mama Duk said...

More than one Brigham Young University sounds best to me pluralized into The Brigham Young Universities. Adding the THE seems to help to my ear. Or you can just be verbose and say Brigham Young University - Provo, Brigham Young University - Hawaii, and Brigham Young University - Idaho. Ups your word count anyway.