Because in 1200s England, speaking French was the cool thing to do!
In English we tend to put adjectives before nouns. You would say “cold day”, not “day cold”. We have some fun, instinctive rules for the ordering of adjectives as well, e.g. “big red dog” not “red big dog”, but that is less important here.
English is a fairly lazy language, so words don’t change much when you change what they are doing in a sentence. When you make a term plural you only change the noun, not the adjective; so “cold day” goes to “cold days” not “colds days” as some other languages would do. Instead of modifying the words, we express that change in meaning by using word order – word order is really important in English.
Some languages have different rules for ordering their words. In some word ordering doesn’t matter as much, if at all (Latin, for example, has some rough rules for word ordering but can change them up for emphasis).
Anyway. In French, adjectives tend to come after nouns, not before. A “cold day” in French would be something like “jour froid” (where “jour” is the day, and “froid” is the cold part). Make that plural (“cold days”) and you get “jours froids” – French adds the s to both words. There are some exceptions to this; for example, “big red dog” would translate to “gros chien rouge” – the “big” goes before the “dog” part, but the “red” part goes after. This is the kind of thing that native speakers of French would know instinctively, but people learning the language might have to practice.
Back in the 1200s French was the language of the elites in England. The ruling classes spoke French, it was the language of law courts, universities, and polite society – a way of separating the elites from the commoners. Which means a bunch of legal and technical terms were also in French. So when this new role was being formed, the French term was adopted; “attorney general” (the French would have been something like “atorné général”). But because it is French the words are in the wrong order for English. Which means when we make it plural it looks like the wrong word gets made plural. “Attorneys general” are attorneys who have a general function, rather than generals who are attorney…ish.
There are a few other words like this – court martial, notary public, secretary general, surgeon general – all technical words adopted into legal English from Normal French in the Middle Ages, and which have stuck.
If you want to go even deeper – one of the consequences of this “upper classes using French” thing is that English has a lot of duplicate words, where there is a “Middle English” version of the word and a French version. For example, why we have the term “lawyer” as well as “attorney” – the former comes from Middle English, the latter from French.
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