Old Retired Guy Blog
February 28, 2010
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Thirty Days has September...We all know that cute little poem that we learned as kids to help us remember how many days there are in each month. I still have to use it because I can never remember if, say, October has 30 or 31 days. I do remember, however, that February has 28 days (29 in leap years). I guess that shows that if you are unique people will remember you. So, why does this poor month have so few days? It would be easy to get to 365 days with seven 30-day months and five 31-day months. But, no, we have seven 31-day months, four 30-day months and one lonely 28-day month. After wondering about this for over 61 years I decided to use that new-fangled internet thing with all of its googles and yahoos and try to find out. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple answer. Did you know that way back in the olden days the calendar used to have only 10 months? In fact, September, October, November and December came from the Latin words for 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th. That's very interesting. Too bad they are now the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months. Apparently July used to be Quintilis (fifth) and August used to be Sextilis (sixth) until Julius Caesar really wanted a month named after him, so Quintilis became July. Later, Augustus Caesar, not wanting to be left out of the fun, changed Sextilis to August. So, that explains the origin of the names of ten of the months. What about the other two? Even further back that Julius and Augustus, like about the 8th Century BC, there was this Roman King named Numa Pompilius who decided to fix the calendar. He was the one who added the two months of January and February to the end of the year and, in trying to make the year the correct length gave 28 days to February. I don't know where those two names came from, however. Sorry. Many years later the start of the year was moved from March to January, which really screwed up those Latin number names. Good thing I didn't waste my time studying Latin in high school! That's it. You learn something new every day. How much of what you learn on the internet is actually true, however, is open to debate.
End of 'Thirty Days has September...' Entry |
