- By Jim Evans
- Entertainment
Print 
SMART TALK
by Dr. Shirley Glibb
OUR TWO-MONTH ANNIVERSARY: At the Center for English as a First Language, we usually encounter this kind of problem in younger patients. Somehow, they missed class the days they should have learned that annual means yearly, and anniversary means a yearly recurrence of a certain date. Yearly.
"Annus" means year in Latin. Not month. Not week. Year.
When a couple says it's their twentieth anniversary, does anyone think they've been together twenty months? And why not?
Very good, class.
Instead of two-month anniversary, the couple should say something like, "As of today, we've been together two months!" This would save them from sounding like chuckleheads.
Unless they relapsed and said two whole months. That would indicate treatment in the William Safire Center for temporal retentiveness.