"anniversary": losing the 'year' connection

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

anyone looked at this?  it's not in the OED of 1989 (though it might
be on the agenda for revision).  ah, now i see that it's in NOAD2,
though restricted to the romantic context:

_informal_ the date on which a romance began in a previous month or
week.

note that this usage has given rise to a kind of retronym, "five-year
anniversary" for "fifth anniversary", etc.

please send replies to dan puckett (address below) as well as to the
list.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Daniel Puckett <danielpuckett at mac.com>
> Date: September 16, 2006 12:19:49 AM PDT
> To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> Subject: Sorry to presume on your time ...
>
> I was watching a movie on cable just now, and it reminded me of
> something I'd been wondering about: Do you know when the meaning of
> "anniversary" changed?
>
> I'm pretty sure it is a change; the dictionaries I've checked,
> including the OED, all list the word as referring to the passage of
> whole years, so that "fifth anniversary" was understood as "five
> years to the day since X."
>
> Yet in much of the coverage of the passage of five years since the
> Sept. 11 attacks, writers kept feeling obliged to call it "the five-
> year anniversary." I searched for the word "anniversary" on
> Language Log and saw a reference (in "Simpsonological Linguistics,"
> March 25, 2006, by Mark Liberman) to a "one-year anniversary."
>
> And this movie just now reminded me of why these writers felt
> obliged to use the word "year," as a character in it mentioned "our
> one-month anniversary." Clearly, to many people the word doesn't
> mean "year-turning" anymore, but rather the passage of a certain
> number of weeks, or months, or years, since an event, and the unit
> of measurement must now be specified -- who cares about Latin anyway?
>
> I realize that memory isn't always trustworthy, and that I really
> can't rely on my memory of the way people I knew once talked, but I
> remember that as a child in the 1960s, I'd hear people snort at a
> sentence like, "It's our one-month anniversary!" and regard it as
> the kind of thing a giddy teenage girl might say. I also remember
> facetious coinages like "monthiversary" and "weekiversary."
>
> Now, it seems, such coinages are felt to be unnecessary (or less
> so; they certainly show up in Google, and "monthiversary" is in
> Urban Dictionary), but now adults unself-consciously can say, and
> hear, "It's our one-month anniversary." Do you know if anyone has
> documented the change?

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