I often hear this, although I certainly can’t hear the possessive apostrophe.
Problem:
These are mispronunciations of a popular February holiday, and one is missing the required possessive apostrophe.
Explanation:
The person whose day is celebrated on February 14 is St. Valentine.
So the proper name of the holiday is “St. Valentine’s Day” or more simply “Valentine’s Day” — not “Valentimes Day” or “Valentime’s Day” or even “Valentines Day”.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got the indicated numbers of matches:
- “Valentimes Day” — 18,800 matches
- “Valentime’s Day” — 7,570 matches
- “Valentines Day” — 1,560,000 matches
- “Valentine’s Day” — 10,800,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase correctly by a ratio of 6.8:1, which is not good!
I believe that the use of “Valentimes” or “Valentime’s” instead of “Valentine’s” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. It is simpler to pronounce the “m” sound in “Valentimes” or “Valentime’s” than to pronounce the “n” sound in “Valentines” or “Valentine’s”.
I believe that the omission of the possessive apostrophe in the otherwise-correct “Valentines Day” is also consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the apostrophe than to include it, and this holiday is only one of many examples in which writers omit required possessive apostrophes.
Solution:
“Valentine’s Day”
