Anniversary (pronounced an-uh-vur-suh-ree)
(1) The yearly recurrence of the date of a past event.
(2) The celebration or commemoration of such a date.
(3) Returning or recurring each year; annual.
1200–1250: From the Middle English anniversarie from the Anglo-French and Medieval Latin anniversāria (anniversary (day)) & anniversārius (recurring yearly), the construct being anni (combining form of annus year) + vers(us) (turned), past participle of vertere (vert (turn) + tus (past participle suffix) + ārius or ary. In Latin, the word was used especially of the day of a person's death but as first an adjective and later a noun, came to be used in Church Latin as anniversaria (dies) in reference to saints' days. An Old English word for anniversary (as a noun) was mynddæg which translates literally as "mind-day". Anniversary & anniversarian are nouns and anniversarily is an (archaic) adverb; the noun plural is anniversaries (the Latin anniversaria occasionally seen).
In literature, probably the best known is Bloomsday, a reference to 16 June, a day (in 1904) in the life of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce (1882–1941). Although Bloomsday is centred usually on gatherings featuring readings from the book, the events also often commemorate other aspects of the author's life and are sometimes integrated with academic conferences or literary festivals. Political and military anniversaries are often marked and can be celebrated even if the original was a defeat; it's all about the context of history and some have been misused by those with their own agendas to pursue. Almost always, these events have a specific date but sometimes the day cannot be mentioned because of "political sensitivities".
In
the early evening of 3 June 1989, in the culmination of some three weeks of
mainly student-led protests directed at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), martial
law was declared and armed troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were
assigned to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square where the protests were centred. What followed a few hours later on 4 June has
come variously to be known as the “Tiananmen Square Incident” or “Tiananmen
Square Massacre” (the CCP preferring “June Fourth Incident”, the same convention
of use the Japanese government adopted in the 1930s when speaking of some of
their conduct in China) and although there’s broad consensus about what
happened when the soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons (sometimes from
tanks and other armored vehicles), the extent remains contested with estimates
of the death toll ranging from low-three to high-four figures. There were at least several hundred thousand
protesters in Tiananmen Square at the time of the incident so all estimates are
plausible but the photographic evidence from the time is so fragmentary that
verification has never been possible.
Such is the sensitivity within the CCP that its impressive digital surveillance of the population has reacted quickly to attempts to circumvent attempts to evade the proscription of references such as “4 June”, “June 4”, “fourth of June” etc. Because the filters are inherently text & character based this was historically usually just a matter of updating the database of “suspect terms”, done usually in reaction to emerging patterns of use but also sometimes anticipated. Attempts on Chinese social media to evade the censor’s eye included (1) using fragments of some more obscure foreign languages, (2) using emojis which possess some degree of ambiguity, (3) using Pinyin (the Romanization of Chinese characters), (4) using coded phrases or metaphors to allude to the event, some of which may be understood only within a sub-set of users and (5) the use of numeric references such as “65-1”, “63+1” or “May 35th”.
Little of this digital subterfuge proved much of an obstacle to the CCP surveillance machine and the regime’s enthusiastic embrace of AI (artificial intelligence) meant that even embedding messaging in imagery or music with no direct mention or even reference to the event or the date can now easily be assessed. Western analysts note however there’s little to suggest the CCP has an especially large task in countering on-line discussion of the “June Fourth Incident”, other than in places like Hong Kong where malcontents and trouble-makers are known still to exist. The CCP allows well-behaved Chinese citizen (ie those with a good “social credit” score) to holiday in the West and probably assumes (presumably correctly) that they spend their time taking selfies in front of the Eiffel Town or Trevi Fountain rather than sitting in darkened hotel rooms using the novelty of Google to search for “Tiananmen Square Massacre”. Indeed, Western political scientists suspect there’s wide knowledge among the population about there being a massacre on 4 June (although not the detail) and for the CCP this is a desirable thing for Chinese citizens to keep in the back of their minds. Like “something nasty in the woodshed” it’s there to be avoided and not discussed.
Some names for anniversaries
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