I believe it is not too late to say a Happy Labour Day to all working classes. These are the great men who power our industries and corporations. And to those who keep the markets alive, I say, “Happy May Day.”
I hope you can see how smart I have tried to be in my choices of the terms for that day for the celebration of the working people. I have used ‘Labour Day’; I have also used ‘May Day’. In a way, the fact that we have different terms describing the same concept shows how peculiar the ‘Day’ of the working brothers and sisters is, among many others that are celebrated across the world. There is the World Health Day, World Environment Day, those for the girl-child, people with disabilities etc., many of them known by just one tag.
More important, however, is the fact that I may have opted for ‘Labour Day’ and ‘May Day’ because I am not too sure of how ‘Workers Day’ should be written. Should it be with or without an apostrophe or, if with it, where do I place it? It thus seems I have hidden under the umbrella of synonyms. Well, there seems to be a lesson here. Apart from the fact that synonyms help a speaker or writer eliminate repetition, they also help in avoiding words we doubt, whether in terms of spelling or other grammatical properties. The cool rule may, therefore, be: when you are in doubt, consult the dictionary or go for the synonym.
Yet, synonymy is not the reason we are in this class today. It is the question of using apostrophes with a phrase like ‘Workers Day’ and ‘Childrens Day’. Or you think both are okay as they are?
The apostrophe is the punctuation mark that shows possession. If I say the boy’s pen, you know what I mean in terms of the ownership of the pen. If I say it is the girl’s birthday, you know whose birthday I am referring to. But when the objects are more than two, and we need to show possession, the apostrophe comes after the plural marker:
This is the boy’s pen.
These are the boys’ pens.
I will attend the girl’s birthday.
I will attend the twins’ birthday. (Or I will attend the girls’ birthday/birthdays.)
It is this simple principle that should guide the handling of ‘Workers Day’. First, do we need to indicate possession? Yes, because we are talking about the day, an anniversary that belongs to the workers. It may not be in terms of material or physical possession, but it is surely not the presidents’ day nor is it the employers’ day. It is the workers’. This leads to the question of where to put the mark. Because we are talking about all the workers, which is plural, it should come after the s: Workers’ Day.
What about the special day for children? Here, because ‘child’ is what you can call an irregular noun, changing to plural not by taking s, the apostrophe comes before the s: Children’s Day, Women’s Day, Men’s Day:
Yesterday was Worker’s Day (Wrong)
Yesterday was Workers’ Day (Correct)
There was a march past on Childrens’ Day (Wrong)
There was march past on Children’s Day. (Correct)
In handling apostrophes, however, you should note that grammar seems to be steadily getting liberal in some contexts, by relaxing the rules, as in accepting the dropping of the punctuation mark where it traditionally appeared. As a matter of fact, some experts may not want to see anything too wrong with ‘Workers Day’. Also, the apostrophe is at times surprisingly absent where you expect it. Consider the question of an association belonging to parents and teachers. Is it Parent Teachers’ Association or Parents’ Teachers’ Association? No! No and no! The standard term is Parent-Teacher Association.
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