More Than A Hundred Anniversaries

This morning I spied the word quasquicentennial in a recent issue of Real Simple magazine. Familiar with sesquicentennial, observation of a 150th anniversary, I did not know quasquicentennial until I looked it up online, first at the Oxford English Dictionary and then in a back issue of American Speech, via the JSTOR database available through my school’s library. Students who have read the book Frindle by Andrew Clements will be amused by the story of quasquicentennial, which turns out to be a word invented in 1962 to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the town of Delavan, Illinois. The Latin roots of the word work out to one-quarter plus one hundred. How wonderful that next year, 2012, will be the fiftieth anniversary of the word quasquicentennial!