three MONTH anniversary
billings@fas.ag-berlin.mpg.de
Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:19:09 +0200
I've been following the "anniversary" discussion and wanted to add my $0.02
worth:
I've heard people in the United States say things like _it's our three month
anniversary_. It would seem plausible that the _ann-_ in _anniversay_ is no
longer connected to the notion 'year' and this allows both the
(etymologically redundant) forms like _five year anniversary_ and even forms
with _month_ etc. instead of _year_ in the same structure. Thus,
_anniversary_ has come to mean 'an occasion marking a number of time units
(years, months, etc.)' or something of this sort. These, incidentally, are
my own intuitions about what the word means in my native U.S. English
dialect. I don't have easy access to corpora here, but I'd suspect that
people could find _month_ instead of _year_ in some of their corpus searches.
Best, --LAB
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