{"id":12096,"date":"2009-05-10T09:53:57","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T16:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2009\/05\/10\/mothers-day-or-mothers-day.html"},"modified":"2009-05-10T09:53:57","modified_gmt":"2009-05-10T16:53:57","slug":"mothers-day-or-mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2009\/05\/10\/mothers-day-or-mothers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Every year around this time, a question of the utmost importance occurs to me.<\/p>\n

I refer, of course, to the question of whether this holiday honors mothers or a mother—that is, whether the apostrophe should go before or after the S.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, since the advent of Wikipedia, it's easy to answer that question definitively. The Wikipedia article on the topic quotes a Vancouver Sun<\/cite> article<\/a> from 2008. The article is about Anna Jarvis, who trademarked the term \"Mother's Day\" in 1912; it notes:<\/p>\n

\n

She was specific about the location of the apostrophe; it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, one could go against Jarvis's wishes—it's not like we pay much attention to her other intentions for the day:<\/p>\n

\n

\"I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit,\" Jarvis complained, dismissing greeting cards as \"a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.\"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But other sources also suggest the singular apostrophe placement. For example, from Wikipedia again:\n

\n

[The singular apostrophe has also been] used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the law making official the holiday in the U.S., by the U.S. Congress on bills, and by other U.S. presidents on their declarations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And MW11 supports that punctuation as well. So I'll go along with it.<\/p>\n

(Yes, I could have just checked the dictionary in the first place. But this route was more interesting. I had no idea the term was trademarked, for example.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year around this time, a question of the utmost importance occurs to me. I refer, of course, to the question of whether this holiday honors mothers or a mother—that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punctuation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}