(~5 minutes to read)
Just when did this nonsense start?
“Today is the one year anniversary of the death of Bart Banger, drummer with the 60s experimental band, The Annoying Guitar Effects.”
“Hollywood stars Annika Airhead and Zac Zeroiq celebrated their five-month anniversary today with a line of particularly pure cocaine.”
I get that language evolves. I’ve acknowledged this in previous articles. But “five-month anniversary” is something up with which I cannot put!
Arts and Culture does a lot of celebrating/commemorating of milestones in the lives and deaths of artists, works, buildings and so on, so I thought it imperative that I help the organizers of such events with the terminology. As I’m sure you’ll agree, this is one of the most pressing societal issues that we face today.
Flexibility vs. Abuse
As people’s perceptions of the passage of time (and attention spans) shrink further, I foresee the advent of the “three week anniversary”: “Darling, our marriage has survived two-and-a-half fortnights; let’s celebrate our three week anniversary!”
Do I need to be more flexible in my acceptance of change? Is one of the consequences of having lived for sixty years (so far) that I have to keep on adapting my usage of and interpretation of English words? Or should I don my shield and armour and fight the good fight with all my might against the tyranny of word abuse?
Being a lazy slob (who lacks armour and other accoutrements) I instead thought about some of the other “period of time” words that I encounter, in order to see if the cause is already lost.
Okotoks—Heart of the Jewel
My home town celebrated its hundred-year anniversary in 2004. I was granted permission to make a commemorative video of the milestone, and put approximately two thousand hours of volunteer time into it. (Okay, I admit it—that was a shameless plug!)
The Town (upper case “T” to show that I’m talking about the administrators of our municipality) constantly referred to the milestone as the town’s “centennial”. This puzzled me, because my exposure to that kind of word in England had led me to believe that “centennial” was an adjective and that “centenary” was the noun. Being the pedant I am, I attempted to introduce “centenary” into the discussion, but it was an uphill battle, and the video was billed as “An historical video celebrating the centennial of the Town of Okotoks’ incorporation.”
If only I’d spent more time with my dictionaries at the time. It turns out that “centennial” has been a noun that means “a hundredth anniversary or its celebration” since 1876.
The perils of taking a stand on shaky ground, especially sans shield etc!
An Obsolete Word
In my “old-as-Kelvin” dictionary, there’s a listing for the word centennium; its definition is “a period of a hundred years.” Why did this word die, given how frequently the word “millennium” has been used for the past twenty years or so?
Back at the Less-than-a-year “Anniversary”
So if I need to be flexible in my acceptance of change, why can’t polluters of the language come up with a new word like monthiversary or mensiversary?
The answer to that not-at-all rhetorical question is that they’re not that new. Apparently, people have been using mensiversary off and on for two hundred years. Monthiversary seems to be much more recent—at least one financial corporation uses the word in its product literature.
It’s All the Fault of That Dead Language!
All the words mentioned thus far have their origins in Latin. Learning some Latin is on my bucket list, but for the time being, I have to be content with regurgitating what I can find out from reference material.
Anno…, cent…, mill… and mens… are all derived from Latin, and relate to year, hundred, thousand and month respectively.
Versus, as far as I can make out, is the same versus that we’re familiar with in sport (e.g. Leeds vs. West Ham; Stamps vs. Roughriders), and means “against”, although the Oxford dictionary provides “turning” as an alternative translation.
“-ary” means “connected with, pertaining to”.
“-ial” is the French form of the Latin “-ialis”, a suffix used to form adjectives.
The words under discussion all came about via the Latin Lego set; words are taken out of the box and clicked together with other words to form new ones—not unlike the British perception of how new German words are formed.
Six Munce Ago I Couldn’t Spell Centurion; Now I Are One
In the decades that have elapsed since Latin was dropped from school curricula (or is curriculums the preferred plural these days?) in all but a handful of schools, knowledge of that language has declined, and abuse of the anglicised versions of the words has, no doubt, increased. I’m sure I’m as guilty as most—which is why learning Latin is on my bucket list.
Plurals of Latin Words
Media, data, formulae, radii, agenda and opera are all technically plurals. The singular forms are, respectively, medium, datum, formula, radius, agendum and opus. I really cannot say I’ve ever heard anyone use the word “agendum” in other than a jocular fashion, and I only ever hear “opus” used in the context of identification of one of the works of a composer. We pluralize “agenda” and “opera” with an “s”, and “formulae” is being forced into retirement by “formulas”, although the transition has been happening for a very long time.
If we can abuse words of Latin origin in this way, what’s the harm in “five-month anniversary”?
I have no firm argument beyond “it ain’t right and it ain’t proper”. Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary allows it: “broadly : a date that follows such an event by a specified period of time measured in units other than years.”
So donning armour and fighting for twelve months between anniversaries seems to be about as futile as King Cnut’s attempts at tide management, although like me, he knew his attempts would be futile. Short of bringing Latin back as a mandatory subject, it will be left to a few pedants to argue about which set of rules should be applied to foreign word borrowings (the donor language’s or the recipient language’s) while the language itself continues its voyage, rudderless, subject to the whims of the average person.
I thought you might like to know—this minute marks the four-hour anniversary of me starting this article. Let’s celebrate!
Your Turn
What’s your take on the less-than-a-year anniversary? Should it be reserved for twelve monthly commemoration, or is it “just a word”? Let me know by leaving a comment.