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In a social media post, a movie streaming site referred to multiple actresses with the same first name of “Jennifer” without repeating the name each time. Instead, they pluralized Jennifer and the caption read, “Jennifers Aniston, Coolidge and Lopez.” Is this acceptable, as in, is that proper grammar? I believe it is, or at the very least understood what they were doing.

tchrist
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Mallury
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    What do you mean "is this acceptable?" To whom? This is not curated writing. It's just random monkeys typing random things. – tchrist Jan 19 '23 at 15:12
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    Plus it's headlinese for limited space. – Yosef Baskin Jan 19 '23 at 15:15
  • “Acceptable” as in “is it proper grammar?” Would a writing/English prof say “X nope, that makes no sense.” The same as if someone screwed up capitalization or possession rules. I understand it’s social media and I understand in general people don’t care for grammar anymore. I was simply curious. – Mallury Jan 19 '23 at 15:40
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    I'd guess it is supposed to be humorous (at least in a mild way), which depends on it being understandable but a little non-standard. Not sure how I can prove this to the standard of an SE answer. – Stuart F Jan 19 '23 at 16:26
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    A comparable usage: Messrs (from the French Messieurs) used to be used as the plural of Mister, so you would see things like "Messrs Smith, Brown and Johnson were present". Mesdames was used similarly for ladies. – Kate Bunting Jan 19 '23 at 16:31
  • Thanks for that insight, Kate! – Mallury Jan 19 '23 at 16:37
  • The brothers Grimm and Karamazov* can easily be differentiated on the basis that the former were real, the latter fictional. I think that's a perfectly acceptable "utterance", but I wouldn't like to say whether the written* form "should" capitalise *Brothers*. – FumbleFingers Jan 19 '23 at 17:51
  • Likely dupe: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39150/pluralization-of-names – alphabet Jan 19 '23 at 21:39
  • It's proper to pluralize a first name. However, I might be quite insulted if they grouped me with two others and we all had different last names. – Lambie Jan 20 '23 at 18:29

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Yes, pluralization of names can take the form cited in the question. It's unusual to actually identify people that way, as opposed to referring to a name itself, but pluralization is not ungrammatical. For example:

There were three Davids at the party.

Our Sues are Sue Smith and Sue Jones.

The U.S. has had multiple Johns as president: Johns Adams and Kennedy.

user8356
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