We celebrate New Year’s Eve on December 31. Pope from 314 to 335, Saint Sylvester transformed pagan Rome into Christian Rome.
The rules of orthotypography are very important in writing. They are used, among other things, to underline the meaning of certain terms, for example by the use of capital letters or hyphens. When the name Holy is part of the name of a party or a place, it is written with a capital letter and is linked to the proper name with a hyphen. New Year’s Eve. But when it comes to the saint himself, the word Holy is written with a lowercase letter and we omit the hyphen: Saint Sylvester.
The questions of orthotypography are rarely unanimous in reference books. The important thing is to establish conventions and stick to them. The respect of these conventions facilitates the reading of the texts by creating a certain unification, since the same spelling will be found throughout the newspaper.
During the holidays, we have to respect many of these conventions. We write New Years Day, according to the rule requiring that we put a capital letter to the specific name, the one that specifies which party it is, and a lowercase letter to the generic name (party, day, etc.). But we write the New Year with two capitals, because this same rule also requires an uppercase of the adjective that precedes the specific noun. For New Years Eve, we can also talk about Christmas Eve and some Saint Sylvester.
On January 6, we will also be celebrating Epiphany, also called the kings day, the celebration of Kings, Where the Kings. But we write shoot kings, without capital letters, to designate the fact of meeting that day to eat the Galette des Rois.
According to popular tradition, after learning of the birth of Jesus, three foreign wise men, guided by a star, went to Bethlehem to offer him gifts. Melchior offered the gold, Gaspard offered the incense and Balthazar, the myrrh (aromatic resin gum provided by the balsam tree). We write the Magi Where the Magi.
Has it been a long time since we have seen each other or have seen each other?
After two lockdowns in less than two years, we often hear the expression “It has been a long time since we saw each other”. Is it right ? Or is there one negation too many?
Responnse
Yes it’s right. The Académie française answered the following to this question: “The negative form is necessary insofar as these expressions express a duration which begins at a precise moment, that of the last meeting for example: the duration therefore evokes a time when the mentioned action did not occur. To keep the affirmative form, the sentence will have to be formulated differently: We last saw each other a long time ago. ”