I am a Grammar Nazi.  This mostly means I get frustrated a lot as most of my friends are online and many of them either don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate they know the difference, for example, between “your” and “you’re” or maybe “there”, “their” and “they’re”, etc.  Many won’t even abbreviate “etc.” correctly.

 

I mention this today because yesterday was one of those days so many Americans do their best to screw up grammatically.  Specifically by celebrating the “fourth of July”.  I have news for the folks that do this:  Every country has fourth of July.  And a fifth, and a sixth, etc.  The holiday’s actual name is Independence Day.  Many countries have one of those, too, but at least it’s not a generic calendar date.

 

It goes a bit beyond that, too.  One of the traditions of the holiday is to shoot off fireworks.  This is all well and good (and dangerous in many cases), but folks start shooting off the fireworks in early June and don’t stop until early August.  This might be a bit more historically accurate, after a fashion, as the Declaration of Independence, the document truly being celebrated, was probably authored in June and most historians agree the final signatures were put on it on August 2, 1776.

 

Of course, we’re getting into semantics here.  The Declaration meant very little immediately.  It mostly meant a few rebels wanted to be free of British rule.  There were still a lot of people loyal to the English crown living in the colonies, and the war for American Independence had barely begun.  We didn’t have our first president for thirteen years; Washington was elected in 1789.  July 4 was the official date of approval for the Declaration, but actual independence took some years to achieve.

 

If all this sounds like a mild rant, I apologize.  I meant to make a rant of it and the abuses some people make of the day yesterday, but, well, I had a weird schedule yesterday thanks to the holiday and things did not go as planned.  For those of you outside the U.S., suffice to say the holiday is, as I am sure such holidays tend to be, a bit insane.  I’ll leave it at that with one more thing:

 

Happy Birthday, U.S. of A!