Just when did this nonsense start?<\/p>\n
\u201cToday is the one year anniversary of the death of Bart Banger, drummer with the 60s experimental band, The Annoying Guitar Effects<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHollywood stars Annika Airhead and Zac Zeroiq celebrated their five-month anniversary today with a line of particularly pure cocaine.\u201d<\/p>\n I get that language evolves. I\u2019ve acknowledged this in previous articles. But \u201cfive-month anniversary\u201d is something up with which I cannot put!<\/p>\n 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\u2019m sure you\u2019ll agree, this is one of the most pressing societal issues that we face today.<\/p>\n As people\u2019s perceptions of the passage of time (and attention spans) shrink further, I foresee the advent of the \u201cthree week anniversary\u201d: \u201cDarling, our marriage has survived two-and-a-half fortnights; let\u2019s celebrate our three week anniversary!\u201d<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Being a lazy slob (who lacks armour and other accoutrements) I instead thought about some of the other \u201cperiod of time\u201d words that I encounter, in order to see if the cause is already lost.<\/p>\n 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\u2014that was a shameless plug!)<\/p>\n The Town (upper case \u201cT\u201d to show that I\u2019m talking about the administrators of our municipality) constantly referred to the milestone as the town\u2019s \u201ccentennial\u201d. This puzzled me, because my exposure to that kind of word in England had led me to believe that \u201ccentennial\u201d was an adjective and that \u201ccentenary\u201d was the noun. Being the pedant I am, I attempted to introduce \u201ccentenary\u201d into the discussion, but it was an uphill battle, and the video was billed as \u201cAn historical video celebrating the centennial of the Town of Okotoks\u2019 incorporation.\u201d<\/p>\n If only I\u2019d spent more time with my dictionaries at the time. It turns out that \u201ccentennial\u201d has been a noun that means \u201ca hundredth anniversary or its celebration\u201d since 1876.<\/p>\n The perils of taking a stand on shaky ground, especially sans shield etc!<\/p>\n In my \u201cold-as-Kelvin\u201d dictionary, there\u2019s a listing for the word centennium<\/em>; its definition is \u201ca period of a hundred years.\u201d Why did this word die, given how frequently the word \u201cmillennium\u201d has been used for the past twenty years or so?<\/p>\n So if I need to be flexible in my acceptance of change, why can\u2019t polluters of the language come up with a new word like monthiversary<\/em> or mensiversary<\/em>?<\/p>\n The answer to that not-at-all rhetorical question is that they\u2019re not that new. Apparently, people have been using mensiversary<\/em> off and on for two hundred years. Monthiversary<\/em> seems to be much more recent\u2014at least one financial corporation uses the word in its product literature.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Anno\u2026, cent\u2026, mill\u2026 and mens\u2026 are all derived from Latin, and relate to year, hundred, thousand and month respectively.<\/p>\n Versus, as far as I can make out, is the same versus that we\u2019re familiar with in sport (e.g. Leeds vs. West Ham; Stamps vs. Roughriders), and means \u201cagainst\u201d, although the Oxford dictionary provides \u201cturning\u201d as an alternative translation.<\/p>\n \u201c-ary\u201d means \u201cconnected with, pertaining to\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201c-ial\u201d is the French form of the Latin \u201c-ialis\u201d, a suffix used to form adjectives.<\/p>\n 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\u2014not unlike the British perception of how new German words are formed.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m sure I\u2019m as guilty as most\u2014which is why learning Latin is on my bucket list.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve ever heard anyone use the word \u201cagendum\u201d in other than a jocular fashion, and I only ever hear \u201copus\u201d used in the context of identification of one of the works of a composer. We pluralize \u201cagenda\u201d and \u201copera\u201d with an \u201cs\u201d, and \u201cformulae\u201d is being forced into retirement by \u201cformulas\u201d, although the transition has been happening for a very long time.<\/p>\n If we can abuse words of Latin origin in this way, what\u2019s the harm in \u201cfive-month anniversary\u201d?<\/p>\n I have no firm argument beyond \u201cit ain\u2019t right and it ain\u2019t proper\u201d. Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary allows it: \u201cbroadly : a date that follows such an event by a specified period of time measured in units other than years.\u201d<\/p>\n So donning armour and fighting for twelve months between anniversaries seems to be about as futile as King Cnut\u2019s 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\u2019s or the recipient language\u2019s) while the language itself continues its voyage, rudderless, subject to the whims of the average person.<\/p>\n I thought you might like to know\u2014this minute marks the four-hour anniversary of me starting this article. Let\u2019s celebrate!<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just when did this nonsense start? \u201cToday is the one year anniversary of the death of Bart Banger, drummer with the 60s experimental band, The Annoying Guitar Effects.\u201d \u201cHollywood stars Annika Airhead and Zac Zeroiq celebrated their five-month anniversary today with a line of particularly pure cocaine.\u201d I get that language evolves. I\u2019ve acknowledged this in previous articles. But \u201cfive-month… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[666],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rant","tag-word-mangling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1569,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/1569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Flexibility vs. Abuse<\/h2>\n
Okotoks\u2014Heart of the Jewel<\/h2>\n
An Obsolete Word<\/h2>\n
Back at the Less-than-a-year “Anniversary”<\/h2>\n
It’s All the Fault of That<\/em> Dead Language!<\/h2>\n
Six Munce Ago I Couldn\u2019t Spell Centurion; Now I Are One<\/h2>\n
Plurals of Latin Words<\/h2>\n
Your Turn<\/h1>\n