Happy Fourth of July to all of my American readers (about 50% of all my lovely readers)! I hope you’re enjoying celebrating your independence, and I certainly hope that you appreciate that I’m publishing a second article today just for you. You see, I’ve got into a habit of writing articles in the evening (it’s currently 8PM GMT summertime), but scheduling them to be published the following morning, so I don’t have the pressure of having to finish it quickly that evening. That’s why I published an article about Wimbledon on the second day of the tournament. But I thought I couldn’t possibly publish an article about the Fourth of July on the fifth, so here we are.

I originally thought about writing about some uniquely American words, or American English more generally, but I’ve already written about that, and there’s not much to be said there that you don’t already know about. But then at some point this afternoon, I was struck by a thought: why do Americans call it the Fourth of July, when normally they use the other format to refer to dates? Why not July Fourth?

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