Attributive nouns

crowfish

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Parse the following four hypothetical auto shop names:

(1) Master's Auto
(2) Masters' Auto
(3) Masters Auto
(4) Auto Masters

The first means the shop was named after someone named Master. The second? Named after several people named Master. The third means the shop belongs to several masters. The fourth means it's a shop for auto masters.

The third example demonstrates a rule that confuses lots of people. It's a noun that modifies another noun adjectively. It's a so-called "attributive noun."

Here's the rule: When a noun modifies a noun, it's called an attributive noun. Generally, when the thing is non-exclusive, use the attributive, not the possessive.

Here's a few examples of attributive nouns:

Mens Shoes
Womens Room
Nurses Station
Judges Chambers

For contrast, "men's shoes" would be shoes owned by two or more men. The women's room would belong to an exclusive group of women. A nurse's station is where a specified nurse should be. A judge's chambers need not be in a courthouse. It could be his private residential space.

This usage is disappearing in English, and it shouldn't. It saves readers effort while eliminating potential ambiguities, and so it ought to be common knowledge.
 
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AW Admin

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Here's a few examples of attributive nouns:

That would be here are a few examples of attributive nouns.

This is an artifact of Old English, extant in Middle English, and more common in Modern British English than American. It's often described as a noun adjunct, because one noun is being used to describe (as if it were an adjective) another noun.

Most attributive nouns are singular; airplane tickets (in Old English, the genitive would be used; our possessive forms are derived from the Old and Middle English genitive declension of nouns).

The use of plural adjunctive nouns is becoming more common, but it's a style choice determined by an editor in terms of whether to use the possessive or an attributive noun. It's more common in headlines (where removing an apostrophe saves space) and advertising. Generally, I lean towards eschewing them unless they provide clarity rather than puzzling the reader. Voter awareness is the possibly confusing example used here.
 

Albedo

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A few years back it was decided that no possessive place name in Australia takes the apostrophe (to make names easier to encode in databases, and to avoid the possibility of catastrophic errors in emergency dispatching). So whether a name was originally Masters Hill, Master's Hill, or Masters' Hill, it is now Masters Hill. Sometimes this looks weird: Tom Uglys Point (a locale in Sydney, formerly Tom Ugly's Point) is spelt that way, despite complaints from some it looks ungrammatical.

Someone just needs to take this further, with a modest proposal to entirely abolish the possessive apostrophe from English.
 

Dawnstorm

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Mens Shoes
Womens Room

No -s: irregular plural.

For contrast, "men's shoes" would be shoes owned by two or more men. The women's room would belong to an exclusive group of women. A nurse's station is where a specified nurse should be. A judge's chambers need not be in a courthouse. It could be his private residential space.

This usage is disappearing in English, and it shouldn't. It saves readers effort while eliminating potential ambiguities, and so it ought to be common knowledge.

Many people would like such clean splits in many areas of grammar, and they rarely exist. Often, it's just people claiming one or the other usage is "wrong". You can advocate for that, but the people whose effort you're trying to safe are likely not going to follow, and "Mother's Day" is going to remain a day for mothers in general. And what AW Admin said ties in here, too: most attributive nouns are singular. So, likely, when you hear a noun ending in -s, people will interpet it as a possessive -s (not sure about that one; not aware of any research). The mistake you made in your post might tie into that, too: it could have been an over-regulation of attributive nouns ending in -s. If people say "men-s shoes" it's always the possessive, since the plural is "men" not "mens", but if you come at it from a theoretical position, it's easy to miss that in a list, when your focus is on the regularity rather than on the words themselves.

I generally advise against making a language more regular than it is. Most of the time a theoretical ambiguity doesn't cause problems in context, anyway.
 

xanaphia

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I am of the thinking that grammar should be descriptive, not prescriptive. Language is an evolving construct, after all, and is enriched through unconventional use.