Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about the apostrophe in President's Day and other holidays.

And then I'm going to tell you why experts think people in Southern

California talk about driving on the 10 instead of just 10. Here's a puzzling question from a

grammar girl listener named Philip Cress that might make your headspan. He asked,

why does some holidays have an apostrophe S while others do not?

Some examples are Mother's Day, Father's Day, Veterans Day, President's Day?

Who decided whether the day is for the person or to remember many people?

In other words, with President's Day, should we write it with no apostrophe at all? Or should it be

President's Apostrophe S, showing it belongs to one president? Or maybe it should be

Presidents' apostrophe, with the apostrophe after the final S, showing it belongs to all

presidents. If you're scratching your head right now, you're not alone. This is one of those

messy corners of the English language that keeps editors on their toes. So let's piece together

this little punctuation puzzle. When we write about holidays centered around people,

whether those people are mothers, fathers, veterans, or presidents, our punctuation can get

challenging. That's because how we punctuate depends on how we view the day's celebration.

Does the day belong to one person? Does it belong to many people? Or does it honor one person or many people? Let's start with the easiest

group to understand. Holidays that celebrate individual people and our relationship to them.

They use singular apostrophes. That's when the apostrophe comes before the possessive S. Take Mother's Day. When we write it,

we put an apostrophe and then an S after mother, because we're talking about one specific mother,

your mother, my mother, each individual mother being celebrated. When you give your mom a Mother's Day

...