Anniversary

• 1. Introduction

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  Anniversary customs stretch back to ancient Rome, where a legion's founding was marked each year as the Aquilae natalis, literally the birthday of the eagle. That same impulse survives in far plainer language today: a wedding date, a nation's independence day, the day a school was chartered. Why does a monarch's reign earn the special term jubilee while an ordinary birthday does not? And how did wedding gift lists grow into a vocabulary borrowed from Latin fractions? Some of that vocabulary was coined by editors and newspaper columnists rather than handed down by custom. This documentary follows anniversaries from the everyday, birthdays, weddings, deaths, and national days. It also follows the more inventive terms built to mark decades, centuries, and even 100,000 years.

• 2. Marking The Calendar

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  Most countries celebrate national anniversaries, usually known as national days. These are typically tied to a date of independence, or to the adoption of a new constitution or form of government. There is no fixed rule for setting the founding date of an institution. Instead, that date is generally settled within the institution itself, by convention. A monarch's reign carries its own markers too: the important dates of a sitting monarch are commemorated in an event often called a jubilee.

  Birthdays are the most common kind of anniversary, with a birthdate commemorated every year. Sometimes the celebration itself shifts for practical reasons. An official birthday might move to a different day, and a birthdate falling on the 29th of February often shifts too. Wedding anniversaries follow the same logic, observed on the same day of the year that the wedding took place. Death anniversaries are observed in the same way, each year.

  The Latin phrase dies natalis, literally "birth day," became a common term across many languages. It refers to the founding anniversary, the "legal or statutory birth," of an institution such as an alma mater. Nations extend the same idea outward. Their anniversaries are usually marked by the number of years elapsed, expressed in Latin words or in Roman numerals. That habit opens onto a whole naming system of its own.

• 3. Counting In Latin

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  Anniversaries in the first thirty years usually take their name directly from the Latin word for that number. The same is true for round multiples of ten, such as 40, 50, 60, or 70. Whole centuries and millennia follow the same rule too, from 100 and 200 up to 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 years. Fractions of a century break that pattern. Years like 125, 150, 175, 225, 250, and 275 correspond to 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.25, 2.5, and 2.75 centuries.

  Roman fractions relied on a duodecimal system, built from twelfths. The word uncia, meaning "twelfth," is also the source of the English words inch and ounce. Latin also had dedicated words for a quarter, a half, and three quarters, called quadrans, semis, and dodrans. Dodrans is itself a contraction of de-quadrans, meaning "a whole unit less a quarter," since de means "from" and quadrans means "quarter." A 175 year anniversary shows the logic at work. It is described as a quarter century short of the next whole 200 year mark, or 200 minus 25.

  Secundus is the Latin word for "second," and bis means "twice," yet neither appears in a compound like sesqui-secundus. Instead, the word sesqui, meaning "one and a half," stands on its own. That single exception hints at how inventive some of these anniversary names eventually became, especially once specific decades and centuries needed their own titles.

• 4. The Stranger Names

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  A mock 12 year wedding anniversary in Northern Germany and the Netherlands carries an unlikely name: Parsley. It was chosen because it falls halfway to the 25 year silver anniversary. The 50 year mark had its own older label too: "jubilee" by itself was once used specifically for celebrations at that 50 year interval. By the 60th anniversary, the label Diamond had taken hold, popularized by the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

  Robert L. Chapman, an editor at Funk and Wagnalls, coined the word Quasquicentennial for a 125 year anniversary in 1961. He later suggested an even stranger term to the columnist William Safire for the 175 year mark: Septaquintaquinquecentennial. It first appeared in Safire's "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine on the 12th of February 1995. Taken apart literally, its Latin pieces, septaquinta for 70 and quinque for 5, actually add up to 35,000 years rather than 175. A separate coinage for the same 175 year anniversary, Terquasquicentennial, has the same problem: its elements literally point to 375 years instead.

  The 200 year mark carries a plainer name, Bicentennial, used for the United States Bicentennial. A 250 year anniversary has drawn several rival titles from individual institutions. Dartmouth College used Sestercentennial in 2019, Brown University used Semiquincentennial in 2015, and the United States itself adopted Semiquincentennial for its own 250 year mark. Princeton University chose Bicenquinquagenary in 1996, followed by Reading, Pennsylvania in 1998 and Washington and Lee University in 1999. A 700 year anniversary, Septcentennial, is probably a modern coinage, with its earliest known use traced to March 1988. The Chiang Mai Septcentennial Stadium in Thailand was completed in 1991. The term later turned up in the 2008 animated film WALL-E, in a joke about a "Septuacentennial Cupcake in a Cup." Not every anniversary name comes from a lexicographer's pen. Wedding gift lists tied to these same milestones grew instead from etiquette guides and popular custom.

• 5. Gifts And Stones

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  Emily Post's 1922 book, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, listed suggested wedding anniversary gifts for eight milestone years. Those were the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, 50th, and 75th anniversaries. Later editions, and other publications that followed, added suggestions for additional years. Together those additions built what is now called the "traditional" list. As a rule, the longer the anniversary, the more precious or durable the suggested material becomes.

  Wedding stones form one alternate list among many other lists of anniversary gifts. These lists partially overlap and partially contradict each other, separate from the "traditional" set that Post helped popularize. National traditions add further variation on top of that pattern.

  A person's birthday stone and zodiac stone work differently from any of those anniversary lists. Those two are fixed for life, tied only to the day of the week, the month, or the astrological sign of someone's birth. They never shift the way a wedding's gift list does, moving from paper at one year to gold decades later.