I had so much fun doing a Christmas-themed post last week that I found myself compelled to follow it up with another holiday-themed post. This time it’s Nochevieja y el Día de Año Nuevo, or as people who aren’t still giddy from managing to pass the first quarter of undergraduate Spanish might call them, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.* The obvious question, as with so many holidays, is whether there’s an apostrophe, and if so where it goes. New Year’s is pretty easy; unlike other holidays, there’s only one new year revelant on that day, so neither New Years Day nor New Years’ Day work, because they suggest more than one new year is starting. (This issue of multiple new years was the subject of a brilliant satirical post last year.) The correct version being New Year’s Day is confirmed in Title 5, Section 6103 of the U.S. Code, and the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971 in the U.K.
So maybe New Year’s Day is a bit boring. Where the real fun comes is when you try to pluralize New Year’s Day. Suddenly you have multiple new years, so New Years Days and New Years’ Days become reasonable possibilities again. Since all three are fairly reasonable, the matter would seem to be one of personal taste. If you’re the sort of person who likes to pluralize early in the construction of complex noun phrases, the sort to say things like passers-by or Attorneys General, then go ahead as pluralize the year before possessivizing, netting New Years’ Days. You’ll be in the company of G. E. Sargent and the Charles-Dickens-edited weekly Household Words. If you’re the sort to treat set phrases as a single word, preferring passer-bys and Attorney Generals, leave it as New Year’s Days. It’s been seen in the weeklies Every Saturday (1873) and the Charles-Dickens-Jr.-edited All the Year Round (1894). If you’re indecisive, omit the apostrophe to avoid having to go one way or the other. That’s done by David Jennings (1730) and others, but this approach seems much rarer than either of the apostrophized versions.
Which version’s “right”, though? I think you all know me well enough to know that I’ll defer on that point.
—
*: It’s sort of sad that I consider this a substantial accomplishment, what with being in my fourth year in a linguistics doctoral program, and given the fact that a moderately intelligent four-year-old could do the same thing if raised in a Spanish-speaking home.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 1, 2010 at 10:49 am
James D
I’d favour “New Year’s Days”, as you have several days, each of which is the start of a single new year. And it brings some sort of consistency with things such as “St David’s Days”, which would mean something altogether different (and presumably unintended) if written as “St Davids’ Days”.
In fact, it seems totally absurd to pluralize something that isn’t already plural (e.g. “Mothers’ Day”) before “days”: “Christmases Days”, “Armistices Days”, “gift experiences days”, and so on. I suspect that there’s actually some rule that one only pluralizes the last noun in a phrase consisting of several nouns, as “gifts experiences” isn’t just wrong in it’s being ghastly marketing speak.
But it still should be “Attorneys General”, as “general” is being used as an adjective: the position is not that of a military commander who happens to be a lawyer. Or maybe it should be “Attorneys Generaux” in one’s best Norman French…
January 1, 2010 at 10:52 am
James D
And apologies for the greengrocer’s apostrophe that crept in there. That is what happens when one half-rewrites “in as much as it’s a” to “in its being”. Or it could just be Muphry’s Law.
January 1, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Laura
I think more people have trouble with “the new year.” Even professional writers and editors capitalize it as “the New Year,” when clearly they don’t mean January 1. — Laura (from http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com)
January 1, 2014 at 5:24 pm
John Mclaren
Being a title I would argue the apostrophe is obsessive and distracting. I believe it’s best without.