Keeping up with the Joanses?

“The Joans and the Smiths led similar lives, until the Joans decided to drive 106 miles to a casino down the Jersey Shore.”

That’s how the voiceover begins in a television commercial for a local venue called Empire City at Yonkers Raceway. (It’s in current rotation in the New York City area, and I don’t even understand the legal basis for a casino to operate in New York State—but that’s another story.)

My set is running in the background pretty often, so I heard this advertisement before watching it. And I recognized immediately that there must be people who didn’t grow up in families that tried to “keep up with the Joneses” (which, it turns out, has its own Wikipedia article)—or hearing about this vain endeavor, at least.

But until I saw the image that would either confirm or refute my presumption, my brain sought a context in which what I heard could be possible. Who were the Joans? Would I look at my television set and see a pair of lesbians? Or close friends who happened to share that name?

Dang. I turned around to find an unexceptional couple of heterosexuals after all, indistinguishable (even in their eagerness to gamble!) from the Smiths next door. Okay, so they’re not Joans. I hadn’t seriously believed they could be—but I wondered how many other people thought that the plural of Jones was Jones.

I might have staged a Googlefight called Jones vs. Joneses right away, but I wanted to see the contexts in which these forms were used, too. (For what it’s worth, Joneses loses the match.) I encountered some queries as to what the correct plural of Jones really is—and lots of putatively legitimate uses of “the Jones.” Wow.

I’ll concede that Google’s hits for “the Jones” could have turned up a love jones or two, but I doubt that that kind of jones accounts for such a significant part of the populace being off the mark! (And here’s something for which I was even less prepared—The Jones’ (used as an ordinary plural, not a plural possessive): “The Jones’ couldn’t keep up with the Smiths.”)

There’s some unmistakable confusion and hesitation about pluralizing words that already end in “s”—more specifically, the phonemes /s/ and /z/. And that’s probably due to the similarity between plural and possessive structures in English.

Yet we do tend to make possession explicit in our speech, even with monosyllabic words like Jones. Consider, for example, that Jones’ and Jones’s are both acceptable in writing; even though the former is more common, there’s a strong tendency to pronounce them the same manner, viz., with the extra syllable that denotes possession: [dʒoʊnz.əz].

What’s the role of the number of syllables in a word? When offered a polysyllabic surname ending in a sibilant—“Douglas,” for example—wouldn’t most speakers know instinctively that the plural is the Douglases (and likewise, pronounce it [dəg.ləs.əz]? Sure, some might spell it the Douglas’, but I honestly don’t think many would offer the Douglas unless they were trying to pluralize Dougla!

Why, then, does it seem to be easier to add the syllable [əz] to indicate possession than to indicate plurality?

(I limited my commentary to surnames because the original example that provoked these observations was one. English doesn’t favor singular nouns that end in sibilants, so there aren’t many of them—but I don’t believe that surnames (or proper nouns in general) receive special treatment by the subconscious rules operating when we form possessives and plurals. Or do they?)