Dates Without Prepositions

[John H. McCloskey]

Dates Without Prepositions (or: The Punctuation of Henry Adams)
1 November 2003

Henry Adams' histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations
contain many, many sentences like the following:

"In July he [James Monroe] crossed the Channel to London and Aug.
17, 1803, was duly presented to George III. as the successor of Rufus
King...." (p. 496 of the Library of America _Jefferson_)

Dates are pitchforked into the narrative as a sort of parenthesis,
with no proposition at all, but usually with a comma or two.

Two questions:

(1) Does any other author make a habit of this?

(2) Considering how peculiar the usage is, how does Adams get away
with it? Why does it seem only slightly odd and not flagrantly wrong?

[andrew]

"John H. McCloskey" <ElChipoD...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:93c9486a.03110...@posting.google.com...

> Dates Without Prepositions (or: The Punctuation of Henry Adams)
> 1 November 2003
>
> Henry Adams' histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations
> contain many, many sentences like the following:
>
> "In July he [James Monroe] crossed the Channel to London and Aug.
> 17, 1803, was duly presented to George III. as the successor of Rufus
> King...." (p. 496 of the Library of America _Jefferson_)
>
> Dates are pitchforked into the narrative as a sort of parenthesis,
> with no proposition at all, but usually with a comma or two.
>

Some American jouralists use days of the week in the same way, e.g., The
president returned to the White House Tuesday. We had a thread about this
phenomenon a while ago.

> Two questions:
>
> (1) Does any other author make a habit of this?
>

The historian Will Durant surrounds his dates with parenthesis:

Cicero returned in triumph to Italy (57).

This is not nearly as offensive as the inline style.

> (2) Considering how peculiar the usage is, how does Adams get away
> with it? Why does it seem only slightly odd and not flagrantly wrong?

The date, which ought to be a noun, has effectively become an adverb. It has
a cheap, journalistic sound to me. It's like if I had omitted the "the" from
the last paragraph, and just written "Historian Will Durant".