grammatical number - Irregular plurals in noun adjuncts


Several psycholinguists1,2 have observed that English speakers do not use regular plurals in compounds, even when the noun refers to more than one instance (dog-catcher, *dogs-catcher), but do use irregular plurals in compounds where the noun refers to more than one instance (teeth-marks, mice-infested).


I was stumped in writing the following sentence (in a discussion about a subject relating to professional women):



? One of the smartest woman mentors I've ever known told me....



I tried the obvious rewrite:



? One of the smartest women mentors I've ever known told me....



Neither feels right. The boggle definitely seems to be due to the irregular:



One of the smartest firefighter mentors I've ever known told me....


* One of the smartest firefighters mentors I've ever known told me....



(Assume in this case that the mentor is a firefighter, but did not mentor me in firefighting, in which case it would equivocally be better written "one of the smartest firefighting mentors".)


The psycholinguistics discussed in the sources above seems to apply here; because I am thinking of a specific woman, but I am using the word in apposition to a plural and thus referring in abstract to all the mentors who are also women, I boggle at which is grammatically correct.


Is the woman-women boggle above just me? Or must I rework to "one of the smartest mentors who was a woman" (bad) or "one of the smartest female mentors" (not bad, but I dislike using the word "female" in this slightly dehumanizing way).


(Note that although there are several chains of duplicate questions about plurals in noun adjuncts pointing to the original "User accounts" or "users account", this question is specifically different, as it's asking about the case of irregular nouns in which the referent's number and the headword's grammatical number are in tension with one another.)


—


1 Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules. 1999.


2 Berent, Iris and Pinker, Steven. "The dislike of regular plurals in compounds: Phonological familiarity or morphological constraint?" The Mental Lexicon 2:2. 2007.)




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