How to Abbreviate St. Patrick’s and One Reason Not to

Last Updated on March 16, 2016

How should you properly abbreviate St. Patrick’s when describing events planned for March 17th? It might be better to question whether you should abbreviate it at all.

When your name is Patrick, you can get a little particular about the way people talk about St. Patrick’s Day. So since it’s just less than a week away, I thought I’d use this week’s grammar post to issue my annual reminder that the correct way to abbreviate St. Patrick’s Day is St. Paddy’s Day, not “St. Patty’s Day.”

Paddy is the abbreviation for Patrick. Patty is the abbreviation for Patricia.

Don’t waste your time making a list of all of the people and businesses who, year after year, perpetuate the wrong one as being the only one. Don’t go looking it up somewhere to show me that so-and-so says “Patty” is okay. Trust me. It isn’t.

A friend of mine recently pointed out something that I thought was very interesting. Because the day is named after a saint, it’s disrespectful to abbreviate the name to begin with. I hadn’t ever really thought of it that way, but I can see that point of view. Granted, we’re talking about a day that most people prefer to observe by getting blasted out of their mind, but still, it’s a day named after a saint: is there any real need to call it something else?

I did find out something interesting about Saint Patrick…it’s amazing what you can find on Wikipedia these days. Presumably, he used the shamrock, which is a three-leafed plant, to illustrate the properties of the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That is how the shamrock came to be associated with St. Patrick, and, therefore, St. Patrick’s Day.

The shamrock is a member of the clover family. A four-leafed clover is much more rare. Some estimates suggest that for every 10,000 three-leafed clovers, there’s just one four-leafed version. The four leaves are said to represent faith, hope, love and luck. Presumably, it’s the additional fourth leaf that represents the luck, though you can fight among yourselves over which of the other three represents which concept.

See? I try to provide a little education here.

And please don’t abbreviate Patrick as Patty!