Shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father
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On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (following up on a lead from Barry Popik) has posted the following antedating of Father's Day, which the OED currently has from 1943:
1908 Boston Globe 19 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) Why doesn't somebody suggest the idea of having a "Father's day," when everybody in the country shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father?
I don't know why the writer suggested a "modest violet", but the idea seems never to have caught on. Instead, as the holiday was commercialized, the celebration came to center on giving "poor Father" characteristically "masculine" gifts: tools, gadgets, golf equipment, grilling equipment, supplies for hunting, fishing, and camping, items associated with sports (especially football), stock car racing, and beer drinking, and so on.
But this is Language Log, not Culture Log. So the main point of interest is the shall in the 1908 quote. First, however, some background on the holiday.
From the Wikipedia entry:
The first observance of Father's Day is believed to have been held on July 5, 1908 in a church located in Fairmont, West Virginia, by Dr. Robert Webb of West Virginia at the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South of Fairmont … [1908 seems to have been a significant year. And West Virginia a significant state for family holidays: Mother's Day in the U.S. was the work of Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia.]
Sonora Smart Dodd of Washington thought independently of the holiday one Sunday in 1909 while listening to a Mother's Day sermon at the Central Methodist Episcopal Church at Spokane, and she arranged a tribute for her father on June 19, 1910. She was the first to solicit the idea of having an official Father's Day observance to honor all fathers. [Dodd spelled it "Fathers' Day" in her petition, but "Father's Day" won out, presumably on analogy with "Mother's Day" — that is, 'a day for Father', rather than 'a day for fathers'.]
It took many years to make the holiday official. In spite of support from the YWCA, the YMCA and churches, it ran the risk of disappearing from the calendar. Where Mother's Day was met with enthusiasm, Father's Day was met with laughter. The holiday was gathering attention slowly, but for the wrong reasons. It was the target of much satire, parody and derision … ["Poor father", indeed.]
Now, that shall. Many readers, especially American readers, would have expected will here; shall strikes them as quaint, old-fashioned, or affected. In fact, shall is in line with what MWDEU calls "the traditional rule" for shall vs. will, as laid out in the Chambers Guide to Good English (1985), a British source:
In its simplest form, the rule governing the use of shall and will is as follows: to express a simple future tense, use shall with I or we, will with you, he, they, etc.; to express permission, obligation, determination [as in the Boston Globe quote], compulsion, etc., use will with I and we, shall elsewhere.
(The Chambers Guide goes on to note that there any many exceptions to this rule, especially in American, Scottish, and Irish English.)
MWDEU says that this rule was "first set down in the 17th century by John Wallis" and observes that it was imperfect as a description of actual usage, even by British writers of the time. The MWDEU entry (which is long and complex and worth reading carefully) sums things up as follows:
Our conclusion is that the traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words very precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.
(In America, will predominates in almost all contexts, though shall is still available, and some Americans disparage many uses of shall.)