Pen-Elayne on the Web

Plurality

Dick Bell at the John Kerry blog posted, "A great big blog welcome to our new VP campaign couple, John and Elizabeth Edwards! The Edwards showed us what great campaigners they both were during the primaries."

So okay, since Edwards is now Kerry's official VP choice and I can't post comments to that blog since - for the second time - they haven't e-mailed me whatever confirmation I'm supposed to click on to be cleared, I'll get this off my chest here. Minor grammatical nitpick, I know, but it's something I've had to deal with since I married Robin.

The plural of the surname "Edwards" is "Edwardses." Just like the plural of "Riggs" is "Riggses." The easy way to remember this is to recall the expression "keeping up with the Joneses." No apostrophes to denote plurals - and when you need to use one to denote "something that belongs to the Democratic VP candidate," the proper usage is "John Edwards' record..." with the apostrophe after the s, because the s is part of the name.

Like I said, I know it's a minor nitpick, but let's at least try to get it right on the official level?