1055. Ever wonder why some holidays have apostrophes while others don’t? We look at Mother’s Day, Veterans Day, and Presidents’ Day. Then, we look at why Southern Californians say "the 405" while the rest of the country skips "the" in front of freeway names.
1055. Ever wonder why some holidays have apostrophes while others don’t? We look at Mother’s Day, Veterans Day, and Presidents’ Day. Then, we look at why Southern Californians say "the 405" while the rest of the country skips "the" in front of freeway names.
The "apostrophe" segment is by Karen Lunde, a former Quick & Dirty Tips editor and digital pioneer who's been spinning words into gold since before cat videos ruled the internet. She created one of the first online writing workshops, and she's published thousands of articles on the art of writing. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at ChanterelleStoryStudio.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about the apostrophe in Presidents Day and other holidays, and then I'm going to tell you why experts think people in Southern California talk about driving on "the 10" instead of just "10."
by Karen Lunde
Here's a puzzling question from a Grammar Girl listener named Phillip Kress that might make your head spin. He asked:
"Why do some holidays have an apostrophe-S [while others] do not? [Some] examples are Mother's Day, Father's Day, Veterans Day, Presidents Day. Who decided [whether] the day is for the person or to remember many people?"
In other words, with "Presidents Day," should we write it with no apostrophe at all? Or should it be "President-apostrophe-S" showing it belongs to one president? Or maybe it should be "Presidents-apostrophe" with the apostrophe after that final S, showing it belongs to all presidents?
If you're scratching your head right now, you're not alone! This is one of those messy corners of the English language that keeps editors on their toes. So, let's piece together this little punctuation puzzle.
When we write about holidays centered around people — whether those people are mothers, fathers, veterans, or presidents — our punctuation can get challenging. That's because how we punctuate depends on how we view the day's celebration.
Does the day belong to one person? Does it belong to many people? Or does it honor one person or many people?
Let's start with the easiest group to understand: holidays that celebrate individual people and our relationship to them. They use singular apostrophes — that's when the apostrophe comes before the possessive S.
Take Mother's Day. When we write it, we put an apostrophe and then an S after "Mother" because we're talking about one specific mother — your mother, my mother, each individual mother being celebrated. When you give your mom a Mother's Day card, you're not celebrating all mothers everywhere; you're celebrating your mom. The same goes for Father's Day — apostrophe-S after "Father" because it's a day that belongs to your own dad.
Valentine's Day also uses a singular apostrophe — Valentine-apostrophe-S. That's because the day was named for Saint Valentine. It belongs to him. And just to make things a little more confusing, you may send a Valentine's Day card — capital V, capital D, and that apostrophe-s in Valentine's — but you'd send it to your valentine — that's valentine with a lowercase v. Why? Because in that case, "valentine" isn't a proper noun referring to a specific person. It's the same as saying you're sending it to your beloved. That wouldn't be capitalized either.
But here's where this whole apostrophe thing gets even trickier: Presidents Day.
What we call "Presidents Day" started out as plain old "Washington's Birthday" (with an apostrophe-S), celebrated on February 22nd — George Washington's actual birthday. But in 1968, Congress decided to move some holidays to Mondays. Enter the Uniform Monday Holiday Act — possibly the most popular law ever passed among fans of long weekends.
But the ironic part is that when they moved Washington's Birthday to the third Monday in February, they created a situation where the holiday could never again fall on Washington's actual birthday. It turns out the third Monday always lands between the 15th and 21st — never on the 22nd.
Since the new date often fell near Lincoln's birthday, on February 12th, people naturally began thinking of that holiday Monday as a celebration of both presidents. Over time, it grew into a day honoring all presidents. These days, many states officially recognize the third Monday in February as Presidents Day, plural. And so do car dealerships and mattress stores around the nation! But officially, as far as the federal government is concerned, it's actually still called "Washington's Birthday." That's Washington-apostrophe-S, because the day belongs to George.
So, where should you put the apostrophe in Presidents Day? Or should you not use one at all? That gets a bit more complicated, and it's mostly a matter of style.
Many style books and dictionaries, including the Chicago Manual of Style and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, will tell you to punctuate Presidents Day with a plural apostrophe — that is, an apostrophe after the S.
But the AP Stylebook says it should be "Presidents Day" with no apostrophe, similar to how we write Veterans Day without the apostrophe. So, the Associated Press treats Presidents Day as a day to honor all presidents, not a holiday belonging to them. Which makes sense, when you think about it, since the majority of former U.S. presidents now live only in history books.
Which brings us to the holidays in the no-apostrophe club. Veterans Day is one of them. We spell it without a possessive apostrophe. And the interesting thing is that missing apostrophe actually changes the day's meaning a bit. When we write Veterans Day without an apostrophe, we're saying it's a day when we honor all veterans rather than a day belonging to veterans.
Columbus Day is another of the no-apostrophe holidays — it's a day to honor Christopher Columbus, not Christopher Columbus's special day. And even that is changing. Many state and local governments have renamed the second Monday in October "Indigenous Peoples' Day." In that instance, the apostrophe goes after the S in "Peoples'" to signify that the day belongs to all indigenous people.
So, Phillip asked who makes these decisions? Who decides whether a day belongs to an individual or group, or whether it honors an individual or group?
The answer is, sort of … nobody and everybody. Many of our holiday names evolved naturally over time, like a giant game of telephone played across generations.
Holiday names often start with how people actually celebrate them. Mother's Day (with an apostrophe-S) became singular because each family was celebrating their own mother. The holiday's founder, Anna Jarvis, even fought to keep it "Mother's Day" — with an apostrophe-S in Mother's — instead of "Mothers' Day" with the apostrophe after the S. She believed each family should honor their own mother separately.
Veterans Day, on the other hand, started as "Armistice Day" to mark the end of World War I. When Congress changed its name in 1954, they deliberately chose "Veterans Day" — no apostrophe — because it wasn't meant to be a day belonging to veterans, but rather a day for everyone to honor all veterans.
And remember our Presidents Day confusion? That name bubbled up naturally as people started thinking of the holiday as honoring more than just Washington. It's like the holiday equivalent of a nickname that catches on — nobody officially decided to change it, but people just started calling it that.
So really, it's our everyday use of language that often shapes these holiday names. We're all experimenting with language until we find the version that feels right.
These little punctuation marks might seem like tiny details, but it's pretty cool how they can subtly change the meaning behind the name of a holiday.
BIO: This segment was written by Karen Lunde, a former Quick & Dirty Tips editor and digital pioneer who's been spinning words into gold since before cat videos ruled the internet. She created one of the first online writing workshops, and she's published thousands of articles on the art of writing. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at ChanterelleStoryStudio.com.
by Mignon Fogarty
The recent LA fires were horrific. I live just a few hours away, and I know people who've lost everything, so I was absolutely glued to the news.
But watching all that Los Angeles news reminded me of an interesting quirk of Southern California English: the tendency to put the word "the" in front of freeway names. For example, people were debating whether the fire would jump Interstate 405, and you'd hear people say things like, "We're in trouble if it jumps the 405," and "It looks like the firefighters are going to be able to hold the line at the 405." Whereas in those sentences, as someone who has never lived in Southern California, I'd leave out the word "the." I'd say, "We're in trouble if it jumps 405." Not "the 405." So what's up with that little "the" in front of the number?
Well, researchers think it may go back to the way the freeway system developed and the way names changed over time in Southern California.
But first, let's look at the word "freeway" itself.
"Highway" is old, going back to Old English where it referred to a network of roads protected by the King or Queen.
But "freeway" — the way we use it today — is much newer. It wasn't until around 1900 that we started using "freeway" to describe roads the way we use it today. One of the most cited research papers about Southern California freeway names, by Grant Geyer, says Californians actually invented the word "freeway" as a way to distinguish its roads from toll roads like the turnpikes on the East Coast — the "free" in "freeway" meaning "free of charge." And although you can find earlier references, the Oxford English Dictionary does have this citation from "Life" magazine in 1943:
Almost everybody in Los Angeles has some pet plan for rebuilding large parts of the city after the war and opening up new ‘freeways’ (express auto highways).
"Express auto highways" is in parentheses after "freeways," and "freeways" is in quotation marks, as though it is a new word the reader may not have seen before, and it needs to be defined.
Now, Los Angeles is known today for its car culture, but that was true back then too. Because of the type of soil in the region and the nice weather, it was easy to build roads, and Geyer says, "It was not unusual even in the 1930s for people to drive long distances within what was at that time America’s most spread-out metropolis." And driving like this was much more common in Los Angeles than in places like Northern California, which had better public transportation and not as many roads.
By the 1960s, although the freeways in Los Angeles did have official numerical names, people were usually calling them by more descriptive names like "the San Bernardino Freeway," "the San Diego Freeway," and so on. When the state undertook a major project renumbering all the state freeways in 1963, people mostly just kept calling these freeways by their same old names, all of which included the word "the" at the beginning.
For example, in her 1970 novel "Play It as It Lays," which is a harsh critique of Hollywood culture, Joan Didon describes a character's trip by writing, "She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura."
But then, around 1975, the state started rapidly building a bunch of new freeways that didn't follow existing routes and didn't have existing city-based names, so people were more inclined to talk about them using their numbers. But — and this seems to be the key — people carried over the 50-year tradition of using the word "the" like they did with the older names. You had the Santa Monica Freeway, the Golden State Freeway, and the 605 and the 210.
Other parts of the country also had named roads before they got their big numerical freeways, but Geyer argues that because of the easy road building and resulting early car culture, "no other part of the country … had such a long history and large quantity of nonnumerical 'the' freeways" before all the new roads arrived, so the nomenclature wasn't as embedded in people's minds.
So that's likely why today, people in the Los Angeles area talk about their freeways differently from almost everyone else in the country. And it stands out so much to visitors that "Saturday Night Live" included it in every installment of a series of bits called "The Californians" that first ran in 2012 and was a soap opera parody making fun of Southern Californians. Here's a clip:
"We got married yesterday at San Pali Mission up in Carmel. We took the 101 to the 1 straight up to Big Sur And got off on Cabrera."
And although the practice of using "the" before freeway numbers hasn't spread widely, more recent research by Brianna O'Boyle at San Diego State University suggests that in the 1980s, people in San Diego started picking up the practice, and also it identifies some more nuanced rules about when people use the word "the."
For example, this study determined that people were more likely to use "the" when the freeway name came after a verb or a preposition than if it came after a noun or it didn't have anything before it. So people were more likely to say, "Take the 10," or "We drove on the 10," but if they used the noun "Interstate" as part of the name, then they often wouldn't use the word "the." They'd just say, "Take Interstate 10." No "the."
And since I mentioned turnpikes at the beginning, I want to end with the interesting origin and evolution of that term!
Originally, a turnpike was a weapon — the OED describes the device used in the 1400s as "A defensive device positioned as a barrier on a road, passage, etc., typically consisting of several spikes around a centre that can rotate, and used to defend against attackers, esp. those mounted on horses." Then in the 1500s and 1600s, a turnpike was also just a barrier that kept people out of a town, especially people on foot or on horses; and then just a little bit later, "turnpike" was used to refer to a toll gate, where people were stopped and tolls were collected, which led to the modern use in names like the New Jersey Turnpike.
So that's where the name for these types of roads come from, and that's why people in Southern California use "the" before freeway names: people are just continuing a long tradition that started with more descriptive names way back when the country was first building freeways.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hello, Mignon.
This is Wendall Albright calling, and I wanted to tell you about a word that we use in my family, and that word is "MIGD."
In the 1990s, my wife and I lived in Mongolia, and Mongolia has a lot of mutton, and it seemed like everywhere we went, every sort of event we went to or a social event, mutton was served, and mutton left us with an upset stomach, and so one day my wife and I were talking about it, and we're, you know, sort of complaining about the mutton upset stomach thing, and between us we came up with "MIGD," which is sort of an initialism that stands for mutton-induced gastrointestinal distress. "MIGD."
And the great thing about it is it's a, first of all, was a useful word.
It describes something that we encountered frequently, and second of all, it happened to sound just like it could be a real Mongolian word. It's not, but it sounds like one.
And from there, and we still use this, you know, 25 years later. We also, from that, came up with dropping the M for mutton, and just calling it "IGD."
So now, if one of us has an upset stomach, or we're gassy, or whatever, some sort of minor stomach thing, we'll say that we have "MIGD" or that we have "IGD."
And occasionally we'll even sort of swap out the first letter.
So if it was like a chili meal that left your stomach feeling upset, maybe you'd say you had "CHIGD."
Anyway, it's a fun little word. We use it all the time, and it's one of those handy ones that very well describes something, and it's quite useful, although I don't expect it to get worldwide acceptance.
Anyway, that's all. Like, thanks a lot. Bye.
Ha, that's a great expansion of your original word, although of course, it's a bummer to need it at all. Thanks for sharing your story.
If you want to share the story of a word you use with your family or friends that's just an insider thing nobody else would know — your familect, your family dialect — you can send it to me through a voice chat on WhatsApp, or you can call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and both of those are in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; and Morgan Christianson in advertising, whose favorite shoes are her pickleball shoes.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.
The following references for the "freeway segment did not appear in the podcast but are included here for completeness.
O'Boyle, Briana. "A San Diegan debate: Take 8 or Take the 8: Investigating the use of the determiner "the" before numeric freeways in San Diego." 2024. Proc. Ling. Soc. Amer. 9(1). 5684. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5684. (accessed February 4, 2025).
Geyer, Grant. "The" freeway in Southern California. 2001. American Speech. 76.2. P. 221-4.
Morreale, Eva. "Yes, California Does Have an Accent — You Just Don't Realize It." 2024. Fodor's Travel. https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/california/experiences/news/heres-how-to-identify-a-california-accent (accessed February 4, 2025).
Rosales, Chris. "Here's Why Southern California Freeways Have 'The' in Their Names." January 7, 2023. The Drive. https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-southern-california-freeways-have-the-in-their-names (accessed February 4, 2025).
Wikipedia contributors. "1964 state highway renumbering (California)," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1964_state_highway_renumbering_(California)&oldid=1269346854 (accessed February 4, 2025).
Wikipedia contributors. "Southern California freeways." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Southern_California_freeways&oldid=1235871961 (accessed February 4, 2025).
Wikipedia contributors. "Recurring Saturday Night Live characters and sketches introduced 2011–12," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recurring_Saturday_Night_Live_characters_and_sketches_introduced_2011%E2%80%9312&oldid=1272948638 (accessed February 4, 2025).
"Freeway (n.)" The Oxford English Dictionary. December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036607203. (accessed February 4, 2025).
"Highway (n.)" The Oxford English Dictionary. December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9545433232 (accessed February 4, 2025).
"Southern Californians Have a Distinctive Way of Giving Directions." University of California, Santa Barbara, Geography Department website. https://legacy.geog.ucsb.edu/southern-californians-have-a-distinctive-way-of-giving-directions/ (accessed February 4, 2025).
"Turnpike (n.)" The Oxford English Dictionary. December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6130361249 (accessed February 4, 2025).