The National Institute of Standards and Technology has announced that January 15 will be the last day people this year are permitted to wish each other “Happy New Year.”
The traditional New Year’s greeting, typically uttered instead of “Hello” or “Good day” as people pass by one another, is popular and appropriate for the first few days following a new year, officials explained. But as the weeks wear on, people become increasingly uncomfortable with the greeting, unsure whether they should say it, how they should respond, or when they should revert back to the greetings generally used for the rest of the year.
In some especially tragic cases, officials said, people have used the greeting well into summer. It was circumstances such as these that prompted federal action.
“As we all know, regulation is important for maintaining an orderly society,” said the director of NIST at a news conference. “With today’s announcement, we are taking steps to avoid confusion and ensure a measured return to more common forms of greeting.”
The 15th is not always the cutoff date for the greeting. In some years, the federal agency has permitted the New Year’s greeting until the end of January; in others, it has prohibited it after only five days. “We like to see how the year is going,” said the NIST director. “Sometimes the year just seems to stay fresh, other times it’s off to a bad start and feels old in almost no time at all. 2006 isn’t one of the worst we’ve had, but it’s fair to say that the bloom is already off the rose.”
NIST, the federal agency responsible for setting and maintaining standards, has in years past stepped in on other difficult issues of measurement. Three years ago, for example, it decreed that babies’ ages could be measured by months up to 23, after which children had to be measured by years. That decision was followed in turn by standards relating to the height children needed to reach before they could be described as “tall” rather than “long.”
Both regulations proved a godsend to parents who, for example, had been describing their teenagers as “206-and-a-half months and 72 inches long.” The correct description, NIST decreed, was “17 years and six feet tall.”