By Robert Schlesinger
Call me a literalist, but … the holiday that many of us are enjoying today (Monday, February 18, 2008) is not “Presidents’ Day.” Yes, yes, I know: the car dealers and mattress salespeople and other assorteds would have you believe that we are today celebrating “Presidents’ Day,” but a look at the official listing of federal holidays shows you that the holiday is in fact “Washington’s Birthday.”
Who cares? This is admittedly not a big deal on the scale of, say, Iraq or the mortgage crisis, but … words do matter. Calling it “Presidents’ Day” cheapens the holiday — instead of honoring the birth of the country’s first president, the “father of our nation,” we are apparently honoring all presidents. As if Buchanan, Nixon and Bush 43 deserve equal honors.
Put another way, suppose we all started referring to the holiday that was celebrated on January 21 as “Civil Rights Day” or “Non-Elected Moral Leaders Day” instead of “Marting Luther King Jr.’s Birthday.”
