Voting for a Presidents’ Day resolution

My annual survey of how we punctuate the day on which each president is honored for about 33 minutes (if Grover Cleveland gets over an hour) produced these:

∎ Presidents Day, the choice that avoids apostrophes altogether: Bonneville & Sons, Portsmouth Ford, Sears, and a brief notice in the Monitor about the closing of city offices. The Monitor supplement also calls it Presidents Day at the top of every page. AutoServ.com opts for PresidentsDay. Concord Nissan likes Presidents Weekend.

∎  Presidents’ Day, still my preferred usage: AutoFair.com, Auto.Serv.com, Lowe’s, and – playing it both ways – the heading on the Monitor supplement.

∎ Creative Alternative: Team Kia nicely skirts the problem by holding a Presidential Savings Event.

∎ President’s Day, the absolutely incorrect version, suggesting that only one president is being honored. This seems to indicate that we each pick our favorite, so that even poor, maligned Franklin Pierce can have a whole day. Two culprits here; the Granite State Credit Union and the video sales site Movies Unlimited, which sent me an email with a “president’s day discount coupon.”

∎ Summation: Presidents Day is catching on, but some people who should know better still haven’t mastered the plural possessive.

To turn to the other recent named day, an article on Valentine’s Day about New Hampshire income stated that “the census asks people to report the money they received during the previous year from multiple sources, including: earnings, unemployment compensation, workers’ compensation, public assistance and more.”

Perhaps matters have changed since I retired from teaching, and style manuals may differ, so while I congratulate the writer on the correct plural apostrophe in “workers’,” I also recommend dropping the colon. Colons do indeed introduce lists, but if one is going to be used in this case, then “including” should be omitted, so that the end of the sentence reads “from multiple sources: earnings, unemployment compensation,” etc.

“Including” is a present participle, and a participle combines the functions of an adjective and a verb. Being part verb, it can take an object. All of the items in the list are thus a multiple direct object, and verbs and their objects don’t need a colon between them. Therefore, the writer has a choice: keep the colon and drop “including,” or keep “including” and drop the colon.

Author: Keith Testa

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