Copyright Los Angeles Times
Every year as the holidays approach, I dedicate a column to helping you avoid embarrassing mistakes on holiday cards like “Merry Christmas from the Smith’s.” And every time, I wonder if it will be the last. Technology, I figured, is making the subject moot. People communicate electronically, and spell-checkers and now AI programs take care of our grammar and punctuation, so there’s no longer a need for an annual refresher — or so I thought. According to a 2023 Bloomberg article, that’s not so: “Despite years of warnings that the humble holiday card would be killed off by digital replacements, Americans still send 1.1 billion annually, according to the US Postal Service. It’s a tradition the greeting card industry says isn’t going to change.” That’s 1.1 billion opportunities to show family, friends and business associates that you don’t know how to form possessives, plurals and especially plural possessives of family names. So once again, it’s time to invest just a few minutes to get names right on those holiday greeting cards. Don’t use an apostrophe to make a plural Two people with the last name Miller are not the Miller’s. So if you write, “We’re looking forward to spending time with the Miller’s this year,” you’re committing the common mistake of thinking that proper names are somehow different from regular nouns. They’re not. Just as one cat plus another cat equals two cats, with no apostrophe, it’s one Miller, two Millers, with no apostrophe. Don’t let names that end in a vowel confuse you For a name like Cho or Antonelli, an S at the end appears to change the pronunciation: Cho rhymes with go, but Chos looks like it should rhyme with boss. In Antonelli, the last vowel rhymes with ski. But the plural form looks like it should rhyme with miss. That’s no reason to stray from the simple rule for forming plurals: just add S. The family are the Chos, even if that doesn’t look like the way you pronounce it. Same rule for the Antonellis. Don’t let names that end with S, X, Sh, Ch or Z confuse you You know how to write the plural of class: It’s classes. One brush, two brushes. One ax, two axes. One blintz, two blintzes. You’ve been getting these right so long it’s easy to forget there’s a formula for making these nouns plural. Add ES. Family names are no different. You’re celebrating holidays with the Nashes, the Joneses, the Chavezes or the Coxes. No apostrophe ever. Names that end in Y don’t work like generic nouns that end in Y Usually, proper names form their plural the same way generic nouns do. But that doesn’t apply when the last letter is Y. A lot of generic nouns like “berry,” “baby,” “fly,” “curry,” “economy” and on and on have irregular plurals that use “ies”: berries, babies, flies, curries, economies. Proper names never change form. Make them plural by just adding S: the Berrys, the Currys, the Cassidys, the Hollys. Don’t confuse possessives with plurals Miller’s is the wrong way to make Miller plural, but it’s the right way to make Miller possessive: We appreciated Ann Miller’s gift. To make a singular name possessive, just add apostrophe plus S. We met Jed Nash’s daughter. We skipped Maria Jones’s party. We were impressed with Ryan Cox’s cooking. Think of plural possessives as a two-step process (and you already know both steps) If you want to talk not just about the Miller family but about something of theirs like their house or their son or their party, take it one step at a time. Step one, make it plural: the Millers. Step two, add the possessive apostrophe at the end: the Millers’ house. This is no more difficult than “the cats’ tails” or “the dogs’ owner.” The possessive apostrophe goes after the plural S. And that holds true for every family name: The Chavezes’ house. The Coxes’ party. The Currys’ tree. The Jonses’ generosity. The Chos’ kids. The Millers’ decorations. That’s all you need to know, so I’ll leave you with one final observation: When I typed “the Coxes’ party,” spell-check tried to autocorrect it to “the Cox’s party.” So … same time next year?
