Grammar Rant Part II: Electric Boogaloo
Yesterday was National Boss Day. I got my boss a card and flowers. She beamed with pride and mumbled a series of nice things about how I made her job easy, that I’m her favorite employee, and so forth. I’m her only employee, so it’s easy to be her favorite. What’d you get your boss for National Boss Day?
National Boss Day. It doesn’t rank towards the top of the holiday list, but it does raise an interesting grammatical question. How is it spelled?
Quoth the employee, “Happy Boss’ Day.”
Wait, is that how you spell it?
Boss’ Day?
Bosses’ Day?
Boss Day?
Bosses Day?
Comparative Holiday Spelling Use
Comparing the spelling to other holidays, we get a spectrum of different spelling standards. The hypothetical authority Hallmark.com gives us the following breakdown. In order of grammatical frequency:
Singular Non-Possessive (11)
National Boss Day
Friendship Day
Independence Day
Thanksgiving
Teacher Appreciation Day
Tax Day
Memorial Day
Easter
Christmas
Earth Day
Groundhog Day
Plural Non-Possessive (5)
Grandparents Day
Veterans Day
Administrative Professionals Day
Armed Forces Day
Nurses Day
Singular Possessive (4)
Valentine’s Day
Father’s Day
Mother’s Day
New Year’s Day
Plural Possessive (1)
April Fools’ Day
Adjective (1)
Sweetest Day
Besides the obvious question, what the hell is Sweetest Day?, we can come to some tentative Hallmarkian conclusions: the use of possessives in holiday names are in the minority, and if you’re going to use a possessive, you should use the singular noun form.
Conclusion
So, I would say it comes down to either National Boss Day, as Hallmark states, or National Bosses Day. You will note that the “job” related holidays dominate the Plural Non-Possessive category. But National Bosses Day doesn’t look quite right, even though it would fit in the same logical category as Administrative Professionals Day. So I vote that we standardize the spelling as National Boss Day and be done with it. Thank you and good night.
Wait, I’m Not Done.
After work concluded with my boss happily looking at her flowers for the last time for the day, Meg and I went grocery shopping at Safeway. To my dismay, I encountered the following floral balloon section. I gestured frantically for Meg to take a picture of each dreadful grammatical mistake, before the evidence was destroyed. Meg giggled and obliged. Damn the passersby wondering why Meg was snapping pictures of balloons.
That’s Three s‘s, Bitchesss!
What I faced, to my horror, was an abomination, the same three letters in a row. No, no, no. NO.
One language maven answered the following question: Are there any English words containing the same letter three times in a row? The answer is no, because the usual rules of English spelling outlaw triple letters.
That’s right. It’s outlawed. Here, in the middle of my local Safeway, I faced balloons defiantly giving the middle finger to the laws of English.
Grammatical Spelling Conventions
My handy Chicago Manual of Style (15th Ed.) states:
Possessive Case. The possessive case of a plural noun that ends in s or es is formed by adding an apostrophe {parents’ house} {foxes’ den}.
Likewise, The Everyday Writer (2nd Ed.) by Andrea Lunsford states:
Plural Nouns
To form the possessive case of plural nouns not ending in -s, add an apostrophe and -s. {Robert Bly helped to popularize the men’s movement.}
For plural nouns ending in -s, add only the apostrophe. {The clowns’ costumes were bright green and orange.}
I dare you to find any grammatical style authority that says it’s okay to make a word ending in -ss possessive with ‘s. You just simply can’t have the same three letters in a row in English. That’s why the Wookie planet name Kashyyyk looks so bizarre. How are you supposed to pronounce that? A really long [i]?
Phonetic Analysis
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt”>When I cheerfully told my boss, “Happy Boss’ Day,” I pronounced it as 
. The possessive, as denoted with the apostrophe, is pronounced with the 
, but isn’t spelled as such, since that would violate the triple letter rule in English spelling conventions.
Wikipedia
You can’t believe everything you read in Wikipedia.
Which Is It?
To Wikipedia’s credit, the discussion page about Boss’ Day does debate the spelling, but hasn’t resulted in a grammatically correct title.
Argumentum ad Googlenem
Boss/Boss’ Day – 596,000,000 results
Bosses/Bosses’s Day – 70,900,000 results
Boss’s Day – 2,990,000 results
Bosss Day – 667,000 results
Boss Trends
Jingoism
Those balloons with Boss’s Day were probably made in China. Do you want to let the Chinese tell us how to spell? Take some national pride in speaking the language of the British Isles!
Calendars
Calendars often state October 16 is Boss’s Day. Did the Chinese make your calendars too? Ref. Jingoism argument above.
Hallmark Cards
Wait, Hallmark calls it National Boss Day. Don’t tell me they have cards involving three s’s. Please don’t tell me.
Happy Missspelled Day
I like this entry 🙂
Warning Comment
Argh. This is one of the problems that would periodically come up at the newspaper, back in my copy chief days. Sometimes the AP style book would provide an answer, but sometimes I just had to wing it. I’m happy to say I never used triple esses. Two other problems haunt me to this day. One is: If you have a family named Jones, do you call them the Jones or the Joneses? The other involved acolumn a woman wrote about turning 30. She called it “The Big Three-Oh and Me.” but should it have been “The Big Three-Oh and I”?
Warning Comment
But I think you will find that a triple s in constructions like “Bess’s mother” is common and commonly accepted, isn’t it? Speaking of the Isles, I believe that both the Times and the Guardian use it, (Daily Mail, too) as in “Jonathan Ross’s wife.” Maybe it’s more common in Britain. Also,perhaps apostrophes reset the “letters in a row” counter. Davo
Warning Comment
@Davo: Journalistic style tends to be a bit more flexible on matters like this, and often reflects changes in modern/common usage more quickly than, say, MLA style. When I was actively involved in the editing world, American newspapers mostly used one of two styleguides, AP or New York Times. Don’t hold me to this, but I believe the NYT style allows for the double and triple possessive ess. <br> About 20 years ago, I was simultaneously editing a newspaper that used AP; proofreading a newsletter for the MLA organization, which of course uses MLA style; taking a job application test for Bantam Spectrum, which used the Chicago manual; writing papers for English classes using the recommended Strunk and White; and trying to get a job with the journal Hypatia, which used something I can’t remember now, the NOW Feminist Style Guide, maybe. (I’m just joking about that last one, but I bet there is a style guide like that.) This is why I have such a bad memory now; I used up all my brain cells on style guides. Bleh.
Warning Comment
> Happy Missspelled Day Just wanted to let you know that I did catch that little pearl to the swine. A friend of mine tells a story that a mutual friend saw “Try one– their good!” on a supermarket sign and actually got the grocer to change it to “there good.” He derived a sort of perverted satisfaction from doing things like that. Dave Barry wrote that the actual purpose of an apostrophe is to warn the reader that an s is coming up in a hand-lettered sign. Davo
Warning Comment