Do you say "25th of December" for christmas day?
Only if we add the article "the" to it. After all, we've heard "remember, remember, the 5th of November."
In practice, since we have Christmas and Christmas Eve, and there is only one of each, we would probably never have need to say it. With that said, I'm pretty sure you don't say "the Christmas" unless it needs to move into the adjective slot with something like "I love that I get off for the Christmas Holiday."
But you don't say "the independence day" either.
Right, just like we don't say "the Christmas." It becomes a proper noun.
Whereas if we moved stuff around "the day of independence" would be required.
Do you say "25th of December" for christmas day?
Yes.
We say both. Informally most people just call it "the 4th".
We say the fourth of July. Because we've added the article, we default back to the normal grammar in our shared language of putting the an adjective before a noun. Makes you wonder why we otherwise have the calendar convention -- but it is what it is. If you look at a calendar, a date is something you can literally point to. So it is easy for our brain to treat it as a noun -- or rather the combination of this fact and the cultural conditioning that is having a language makes us used to parsing it that way. But the holiday itself, is not the calendar item. So it's either "the July 4th holiday" or "the 4th of July" -- and people are almost always going to take the easier route.
Just thinking about how we use it, we mainly flex into calling it the 4th of July when we are talking about it in the capacity of a holiday. An American putting it on the calendar could say something like "what are our plans for July 4th?"
Contrast this with when we talk about it as a holiday, like "what is your favorite food for the fourth of July?"
But why do you refer to the holiday by its date rather than the actual name of the holiday?
a lot of us consider "the 4th of july" another name for the holiday not just a descriptor of the date....
I am just conjecturing here, but I think we don't say Independence Day much out of some combination of the U.K. being one of strongest allies on the one hand and a desire to be strong and ergo never "dependent" on the other. I'm pretty sure it used to be more common to say Independence Day.
I’m thinking it’s because they use the correct format DD/MM/YYYY for important things :p
Excuse me, but the only correct format is YYYY-MM-DD.
ISO 8601 gang
^ This is the correct answer. :3
All dates can technically be said either way in American English. It's not wrong to say "the 5th of May," but it sounds a lot more formal.
I too have wondered this.
They were still using proper English back then.
Zero_1 |18 pointswritten 3 years ago ago
July 4th sounds lile july 5th or 6th. It's not special at all. 4th of july indicates its a special occasion.