x and them

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 03:05 PM 3/1/00 -0800, you wrote:
>On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Peter A. McGraw wrote:
>
> > Let's take this thread in a different direction.
> > A similar expression to "X and them" is "Xs" or "X's" (I'm not sure which
> > it is).  Thus a great aunt of mine in Iowa (who had lived on a farm all her
> > life) referred to her son and his family as "Dales" (or "Dale's"?).  I've
> > never heard it anywhere else, but when I mentioned it as a curiosity to a
> > female colleague in Dayton, Ohio, who was something of a feminist, she
> > said, "Oh, yes--I just hate that!" indicating at least that it probably
> > wasn't restricted to Iowa.  (This colleague had grown up in Albuquerque,
> > NM, but lived most of her adult life in urban Ohio.)
> > Does anybody know more about the geography of this, or whether the /-s/ is
> > plural or possessive?
>
>I don't know anything about the geography of this construction, but I can
>give you another data point: my girlfriend does this, and she's from Port
>Orchard, Washington (near Seattle).  Her intuition is that it is a plural,
>not a possessive.  I would tend to agree.

We used it in Minnesota regularly, but I understood it to be possessive, as
in "We're going over to Christina's [place]."  And note that it could refer
to a woman's as well as a man's place or family.