Yesterday, we marked Mothering Sunday at church. This is the traditional title for what is often now called Mother’s Day. I think the apostrophe would be better placed to give Mothers’ Day, a community celebration of all mothers but apparently Anna Jarvis, who pressed for it to be recognised, trademarked the singular possessive, “for each family to honor (sic) its own mother” (according to the Wikipedia article), although it is also said she quickly became disgruntled with how companies like Hallmark seized on it as a commercial opportunity. The American date isn’t until early May; we used the traditional term, which avoids the possessive pitfall.

I’d assumed Hallmark also later came up with Father’s Day and many others as further card-selling opportunities although (Wikipedia again) suggests it was established in the USA at about the same time by another individual. However, there isn’t an equivalent Fathering Sunday, and that is what struck me as interesting. Mothering can be used pejoratively but it also implies an ongoing relationship in which a mother offers comfort and support to her child. You could draw a similar meaning from ‘fathering’ but it would more typically be used to mean the act of procreation leading to the fusing of sperm and egg and the formation of a zygote and all the subsequent stages of development of a child.

Is that a disgrace for English or just another of the many, many anomalies caused as words drift and develop. For example, many would have to stop and think if you described yourself as gruntled. Wits have observed that it should be the opposite of disgruntled but etymology suggests that gruntling was originally equivalent to grumbling. These unpaired words often do have others that can serve as an effective opposite but you can’t do that by adding or removing a prefix or suffix. Think, for example, of bashful (bashless? bold or something of its ilk would be better) or inept (I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone claim that they were ept even though it would seem to have an apt logic as the opposite of inept).

Ah, English! Often asymmetrical among its many other peculiarities.