My late partner, an elementary school teacher, once had 2 Jesuses in her class. When she called them Jesus they would cry and say their name was pronounced Hayzoos.

@JackPedigo Quite understandable, really. The sound of a name is more important than the spelling. When Spanish speakers assimilate English words, they alter the spelling to suit their way of pronouncing sounds. Hence, "Hello" becomes "Gelo".

My understanding is that the ONLY time an apostrophe is involved in forming a plural is in the plural of individual letters. Five a's, three b's etc. So is Jesus something special? Some would say yes, I guess.

Correction.. the arabic name was Isa.... notice the long e sound with "I", y's and I's.... great vowel shift y becomes j.... jacobi.... or jacob pronounced yacob.....

I thought Dion was a Belmont! This is very confusing.

@Sticks48 state what is confusing I will clarify... this information exists in the historical record, linguistic, archeological, and mythological as well.

@Bierbasstard i think u b funny, zeus is the English translation of the ancient greek term. Jupiter is the English translation of the Latin Vulgate I believe. So it becomes tricky translating through languages, so you have to think in time periods as well. Languages evolve. The original Latin translation for Zeus was not Jupiter. The phoneme or lettet J did not exist at that time. Not sure what the correct spelling or pronounciation wad for the term in Latin. We are talking late century B.C. 100 B.C. to 400 A.D. I could reseach if need be, but I like to leave un answered questions to the questioner. Learn how to Learn is Amazing... I am a non-stop researcher begining in 2004, and have never stopped. I had a couple of classes in linguistics, one under a 1st generation Noam Chompsky.

@Coffeo plural nouns that end in -s get just the apostrophe. Singular nouns that end in -s get 's.... and of coarse I missed. But now you know.

@Etre I'm just making a joke. Actually l could care less.

@Sticks48 I thought thats what you ment, the belmont.... was sure but familiar. I do not know any horses per se.... but the term Belmont can be broken down etymologically to bel- beautiful and mont- mountain. Latin language cognates. Just looked it up, its a norman french sirname from 1066 that denotes the above stated beautiful hill, referring to certain hills in Normandy France.

@Etre Not for plurals. That's possessive.

@Coffeo right, but you have plural and singular nouns. Aposrophes have two functions they denote possession and the omission of letters.... I see what happened... your right I was thinking plural possessive, not plural. Good Catch light bulb you knew the whole time.

@Coffeo oh and im not a prescriptive grammerist, descriptive grammerist in theory and truly not a grammerist at all.

@Etre I try not to be too prescriptive also, but it is kind of what this post is about.

@Coffeo true.... very true.

A sidecar of Jesuses is a good collective noun name. Actually, it's a pretty good band name too.

@carlyhorton To be honest, I have two stock phrases - the "family friendly" one is Christ in a sidecar, which when you think about it is an amusing image. My second is not so family friendly... And, yes, I would totally buy a band T-shirt with "A sidecar of Jesuses" on it.

@Palindromeman In my neck of the woods, it's "Christ on a cracker." But Christ is a sidecar is a much funnier image! What's the not family-friendly one?

@carlyhorton I do know of Christ on a cracker, but somehow yes the sidecar is funnier. The not so family friendly one is where I let my Australian side show - f*ck me sideways. Which also brings its own imagery, now that I think about it...