Yet another Father’s Day is upon us Sunday, June 18, and hopefully people have already bought dear old Dad a cool gadget or witty card to mark the occasion. We wonder, from where on earth these days came into existence at all and why are these days so important and relevant. There had always been unknown facts about many occasions which gets light on them with retrospect from the past.
Here are some less known facts about this special day
The Origin and Grammar of Father’s Day
While Mother’s Day became an official holiday in 1914, Father’s Day took a little longer to be considered a national holiday. The origin of Father’s Day lies in two unrelated tragic events.
In a small West Virginia about six months after the Monongah mining disaster, of 1907, 350 men lost there lives. The little children in that town lost there fathers. Grace Golden Clayton organized an event to honor the fathers killed in the catastrophe. On the other side of the country, a similar father-related thought was persisting inside Sondra Smart Dodd, whose mother died in childbirth.
Dodd believed there should be a corresponding holiday to celebrate fathers. After all, she and her five siblings had been raised by her father and Civil War veteran, William Smart. Dodd successfully gained support for her idea, and the first Father’s Day was celebrated by Washington State in 1910 in June, the month of her father’s birthday. Later after several countenances President Richard Nixon officially signed a proclamation making Father’s Day federal holiday that falls on the third Sunday in June.
People often wonder why Father’s Day has an apostrophe before the s.
It is perceived that , Father’s Day is a time to celebrate the greatness of your own dad, and to hell with the rest of them. With the apostrophe before the s, Father’s Day “belongs” to each individual father.
If the apostrophe fell after the s, the meaning slightly changes. That would be a holiday “belonging” to all fathers as a collective.
Ironically the April Fools’ Day, for example, takes the possessive plural rather than the singular plural. Perhaps this is because the individual fool doesn’t matter here in the way in which each individual father matters to his children. Isn’t that fact hilarious?
Apart from the facts , this day has created a lot of significance by devoting movies like The Father’s Day of 1997 stars Robin Williams and Billy Crystal as two strangers who go on a quest to find a boy after the ex they share informs.