Our question is this: is the celebration limited to persons or should people join in the fun? Back in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, back in the days before Canada legally acknowledged that women were persons — in fact, back as far as the middle of the last century — using the term people in place of persons could earn a person a chiding from grammarians.

Why? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that the grounds of the dispute shifted over time. At first, some people objected to using people when the context gave any indication that the word was thought of as a plural (as in several people). Then folks objected to using people with numbers (as in one thousand people). Over time, round numbers came to be considered acceptable (a dozen people) while specific numbers (twelve people) were deemed undesirable. It wasn’t until the 1980s, more than a century after the persons-people dispute began, that most usage books accepted — and even encouraged — the people construction that had been used by everyone from Chaucer to Dickens to ordinary people.