Hacker News Reader

Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

> Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop

Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).

View on HN

I don't know about the US, but in the UK you can definitely say "D-Day" to mean "an anniversary of the original D-Day", not strictly 6/6/1944. It's not wrong.

Just like you can say "Independence Day" to mean July 4th of any year, not only the specific historical date on which the US declared independence.

This would make sense if there's often D Day ceremonies. In the us I think that's all moved to memorial Day, so D-Day pings only as the original event here

You could say e.g. "today is D-Day" to mean "today is June 6th".

But if you said "D-Day" without context people would assume you meant the event in WWII. So yeah, I guess the original headline is definitely misleading, if not strictly inaccurate.

Hmm I'll take your word for it that that's true, but I would say the examples are very different. Independence Day is a title/holiday retroactively created to commemorate the event (which apparently might not have even happened on July 4).

Whereas D-Day was something soldiers used to describe that specific day even before it happened. And you would hear things like "D-Day plus 23" to describe points in time, you wouldn't have to specify the year

So to me the Independence Day analogy is a little weak.

That was the original usage but there is no reason to think usage hasn't changed in Britain, if a British person is saying it is now used this way.

I'm not a betting man, but I were, I'd bet on most readers having understood it correctly. I suspect it was meant to be click bait, though.

Made me do a double take for sure.

The headline definitely didn't make any sense to me (I was thinking maybe an Onion article?) before reading the rest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com