A Road Less Travelled

In my last post I referred to the the ‘Evanses’.  I did this after intense research –okay, okay, I really just did a quick google search– into the proper pluralization of surnames ending in ’s’.  I settled on this method on the authority of this website, which provided this nugget:

When a proper noun ends in an “s” with a hard “z” sound, we don’t add any ending to form the plural: “The Chambers are coming to dinner” (not the Chamberses); “The Hodges used to live here” (not the Hodgeses). There are exceptions even to this: we say “The Joneses are coming over,” and we’d probably write “The Stevenses are coming, too.” A modest proposal: women whose last names end in “s” (pronounced “z”) should marry and take the names of men whose last names do not end with that sound, and eventually this problem will disappear.