How to Make Your Last Name Plural This Christmas Season

[spaniardx]

An Essay on Esses

“Did no one teach these people how to make their last names plural!?” I scream as I chuck the cards into the fire heretofore crackling peacefully beneath the mantel. I watch the cards curl and disintegrate in the flames, and I wonder if I’ve overreacted.

Sweetcheeks, even if you are living with the 'rents, those were not yours to immolate. Hope momma didn't retaliate by giving the spatula lickin duty to daddy. Now, go pour a couple capfuls of Wild Turkey in that coco and CTFO.


We have folks pluralizing our last name all through the year. Were we to send out cards, would just slap "Family" after the surname.

[vitugglan]

We always put 'family' on Christmas cards. 'The Smith Family / 100 Street Name / City, State, Zip' and we sign it with all of our first names and the family name beneath: Vitugglan, Husband, Third-born Vitsfamily.

The thing about apostrophes is that they're indicative of a larger problem - people aren't learning what they used to learn in school. When I was in school it was considered the height of ignorance to misplace an apostrophe. There's no 'pound's and ounce's' or Kennedy's family, there are 'pounds and ounces' and Kennedy family or Kennedys. Ignorance is when a person hasn't been given the information they need in order to do a task, so the implication was that the person misusing apostrophes was unschooled or under-schooled.

It still means the same thing today. I could go on and on, but I did an informal survey of the husband (who is eight years younger than I am) and the last-born, who was born near the beginning of the 1990s and neither of them knew how to place an apostrophe in a contraction. The husband said he memorized all of the contractions (so he can't create a new one or recreate an older one like 'Tis') and the last-born assumed the apostrophe comes between the second-to-the-last letter and the last letter.