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Alexander, forgive my lateness here, but April Fools' Day takes the apostrophe after the S not before. I might be wrong. I often am. But check with your style book. I am sure on this one.
And after a joke is over, one says "April Fools!" with no apostrophe. CHeck. and get back to me later.

several comic strips got it wrong on April 1st too. among them ''zippy'' by bill griffith

Yup. And I've known that since 1984. I don't know where my head was.

I wrote to Jim Romenesko at poynter.org and he told me that it can be written both ways, according to different style books at different papers. So who's right? Is it April Fool's Day or April Fools' Day? Jim said both are right and he refused to print my letter there. So maybe I am wrong. Can you clear this up with a citation? Or do we have to ask the Language Maven Bill Safire himself?

Dan, different shops use different style books. With a few exceptions that aren't relevant here, the N&R relies on The Associated Press' style book, which has it as you said.

Thanks for the heads up there. Since we're in the style mode, new question for you. There was a NYTimes article today, maybe you ran it there too, via their News Service, written by the esteemed columnist Tom Friedman, and he was writing about outsourcing and globalization, and he used this term: 24/7/365 ...... to mean something that happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.....but shouldn't the correct term be 24/7/52?

24 is days, 7 is weeks, and then 52 weeks in a year. The way he wrote it, and it appears that way in his new book, too, seems graceful, yet incorrect.

What does your stylebook there say?

Or if it is such a new term, what say you, gut feelings?

Stylebook says nothing. My gut says anything beyond 24/7 is redundant and feels clumsy.

I guess the stylebooks have not taken this term into account yet, it is so new. 24/7, of course, has been around for a long time, to mean "every day" or "around the clock" or "all day and night, seven days a week."

But some people have felt the need to make it into a year term, all year round, in other words, "24/7 all year round" and it was used by Chevrolet in an ad last year as "24/7/365."

If you google both terms, 24/7/52 or 24/7/365, you will see that both terms are being used now interchangably. Tom Friedman just used the 24/7/365 style in his new book and a recent NYTimes magazine piece.

My own feeling is that 24/7/52 looks and sounds ungraceful while 24/7/365 looks and sound groovy and cool.

I guess we will have to wait a while before the AP style book catches up with this new term. Because of the Internet, and emails, it is catching on .....bigtime.

24/7 is different from 24/7/365.

I coined a newer term even, "24/7/365/4ever" which means "forever" ..."for all time" ...."for all eternity." It has not caught on yet.

24/7/365 is ridiculously redundant.

Clearly, 24/7 means "all the time". Are we afraid that if we don't imply "all year", people will think we only mean one specific week?

If you really need something more "groovy and cool", then consider 24/365.

Another issue I find at least as serious is the use of the slash. Slash means division. We should be writing 24x7. In fact, it's not unusual to hear this colloquialism spoken as "twenty-four by seven"... although this is, unfortunately, being supplanted by the far more groovy and cool "twenty-four seven".

JDP