Keeping Up With The Joneses Mac OS
Editor—As a Welshman, I feel I must question the grammatical correctness of the title of your recent Editorial:1 Electronic manuscript submission to the BJA: keeping abreast of the times, or keeping up with the Jones’.
Mar 31st, 10:00 AM Mar 31st, 11:30 AM. Keeping Up with the Joneses: How Snapchat Stays Relevant. DETI 3rd Floor of Library. The article we chose from Fortune Magazine is entitled “3,2,1 Countdown to the Snapchat Revolution” and is written by Jessi Hempel, Adam Lashinsky, Marty Jones, and Chanelle Bessette.The article discusses the history of Snapchat and the past and present challenges it.
The plural of Jones is Joneses, ‐es being added as an indicator of the plurality of a word of which the singular form ends in s, as in dresses or messes. The apposition of the much misused apostrophe to the word Jones does not pluralize it. Although apostrophes should normally be used to indicate possession, their use to indicate plurality is acceptable, but only under certain circumstances (e.g. for numbers or individual letters). Examples might include the 1990’s (although most now prefer the 1990s), and phrases that would not make sense without the apostrophe, such as ‘there are three i’s in the word inhibit’. If possession was implied, for example if the understood full sentence might have been something similar to ‘keeping up with the Jones’ changes’, but the word changes was omitted, the title should have ended with the Joneses’, as it is always assumed that more than one Jones is involved.
- A suburban couple discovers their neighbors are covert spies embroiled in espionage in this comedy with an all-star cast, including Zach Galifianakis, John Hamm and Isla Fisher.
- In Macintosh systems, the operating system may be any available operating system, such as MAC OS X. Keeping Up With the Joneses, filed May 7, 2014.
It may be possible to argue that a final s had been omitted from the word Jones’s. This change is often made to words ending in s, as in the use of St Thomas’ Hospital in place of the perhaps more correct St Thomas’s Hospital. However, this would again imply a singular Jones.
In summary:
Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses
The house of Mr Jones = Mr Jones’(s) house
The house of Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses’ house
‘Keeping up’ with the practices or possessions of Mr and Mrs Jones = Keeping up with the Joneses
Keeping Up The Joneses Idiom
Yours, hopelessly lost in grammatical pedantry,
W. Harrop‐Griffiths
The Harrop‐Griffithses’ House
London, UK
References
1Hunter JM. Electronic manuscript submission to the BJA: keeping abreast of the times, or keeping up with the Jones’.
I fully endorse Harrop-Griffiths' view. There are very few singular nouns, common or proper, in English which end in 's'. Jones is one of them: 'lens' is another. The plural of lens is 'lenses'. The singular terminal 's' is so unwelcome to some authors that they even add an 'e' (= lense) to the word. I have not complied a list of such nouns, but perhapssomeone should do so.
Conflict of Interest:
None declared
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