Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November;
February has twenty eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one
Except in Leap Year, that’s the time
When February’s Days are twenty-nine. – Traditional English rhyme
One year ago today…there was no day. Because today is Leap Day, which only comes once every four years. Well, almost every four years; centennial years aren’t leap years unless they’re evenly divisible by 400. In other words, 2000 and 1600 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. It’s that little difference which caused the Julian calendar to creep ahead; the Roman calculations weren’t quite precise enough to determine that one extra day every four years is just a smidgen too much, so in the Julian calendar centennial years are leap years. The error was ten days when Pope Gregory XIII ordered it corrected in 1582, but eleven when the British Empire adopted his calendar in 1752 (they had added a leap day in 1700 when they shouldn’t have). By the time Russia adopted it in 1917 the error had increased by two more days (1800 and 1900); that’s why the Russians celebrate Christmas on January 7th. And if the Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t switch to the Gregorian calendar by 2101, it will then move to January 8th.
Because it doesn’t occur every year, a February 29th birthday is the only one rarer than mine. What’s that, you say? What’s special about my birthday? Well, a study released last year shows that fewer babies are born on Halloween than on any other day of the common year; 11.3% fewer, as it turns out. So while roughly 1 person in 365 was born on any given day, only about 1 in 411 was born on Halloween. Even more interestingly, roughly 1 in 347 are born on Valentine’s Day:
Pregnant women are capable of influencing the timing of their babies’ births, according to a study that shows fewer children are born on Halloween…Dr Rebecca Levy of Yale School of Public Health, who led the study, said Halloween’s associations with death, evil and skeletons might subconsciously put women off giving birth. “The study raises the possibility that the assumption underlying the term ‘spontaneous birth’, namely, that births are outside the control of pregnant women, is erroneous,” Dr Levy told New Scientist magazine. She added that a connection between the state of mind of pregnant women and hormone levels could explain the link…
Dr Levy and colleagues analysed data from birth certificates for all births in the US that took place within one week on either side of Valentine’s Day and Halloween between 1996 and 2006. They found the likelihood of women giving birth on Valentine’s Day was on average 5% higher than on other days during the week before or the week after. It was 3.6% higher for natural, non-induced births and 12.1% higher for Caesarean section births. The chance of deliveries occurring on Halloween was on average 11.3% lower than during the days in the week before and after. This broke down to 5.3% lower for natural, non-induced births, and 16.9% lower for Caesareans…
There has been anecdotal evidence from partners of members of the military suggesting that when fathers are due to return from postings away from home close to the date of birth, their babies sometimes “wait” until their return before being born, [and] a 2003 study carried out in Taiwan showed increases in Caesarean births on auspicious days and decreases on inauspicious days of the Chinese lunar calendar.
I wonder if mothers who are scheduled to give birth on February 29th might also unconsciously influence that one way or another, either to give the child a unique birthday or to avoid one that doesn’t come every year.
So, why does February have only 28 or 29 days anyway? Couldn’t they have just taken one day each from two of the 31-day months and given them to February so she’d have 30 most of the time? I’ll leave that one to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope:
…[In] the 8th century BC…a Roman king by the name of Numa Pompilius established the basic Roman calendar. [Previously] the calendar covered only ten months, March through December…[(which means “tenth month”)]…July was originally called Quintilis, “fifth,” Sextilis was sixth, September was seventh, and so on…3,000 years ago, not a helluva lot happened between December and March. The Romans at the time were an agricultural people, and the main purpose of the calendar was to govern the cycle of planting and harvesting. Numa, however…decided it was going to look pretty stupid if the Romans gave the world a calendar that somehow overlooked one-sixth of the year. So he decided that a year would have 355 days — still a bit off the mark, admittedly, but definitely a step in the right direction. [This] was the approximate length of 12 lunar cycles, with lots of leap days thrown in to keep the calendar lined up with the seasons. Numa also added two new months, January and February, to the end of the year. Since the Romans thought even numbers were unlucky, he made seven of the months 29 days long, and four months 31 days long. But Numa needed one short, even-numbered month to make the number of days work out to 355. February got elected. It was the last month of the year (January didn’t become the first month until centuries later), it was in the middle of winter, and presumably, if there had to be an unlucky month, better to make it a short one…
Some historians say that when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar (and you can see how badly in need of reformation it was), he made February 29 days long (30 in a leap year). For his work, the month of Quintilis was renamed “July” in his honor. When his nephew Augustus became emperor, Sextilis was renamed “August” for him, and some say he stole a day from February to make his month as long as Julius’. Perhaps, but there’s not really any primary evidence for it (like a calendar chart from Julius’ day showing a 29-day common-year February). What’s important, though, is that the “renaming months after emperors” thing stopped with Augustus; I’d really hate to have been born in the month of Caligu.
Whaddaya mean we in the glorious British Empire “added a leap day in 1700 when they shouldn’t have”???!
We’ll add a damn leap day whenever we damn well want to add a damn leap day, thanks very much.
…bloody yanks….
Bloody Papists, you mean. We were still part of the Empire then. 😉
Births locally aren’t evenly spread throughout the year — September is the peak month. (Work it out!)
Julius Caesar, so the legend goes, got Cleopatra’s “chief scientific officer”, the Greek Sosigenes to do the sums for the new calendar. Naked eye astronomy and an error of 1 day in 150 years is pretty good. When Pope Gregory’s mathematicians recalculated the length of the year, they used Copernicus’s “heretical” heliocentric model to do the sums.
The commission organising the change of the calendar in Britain in 1752 reckoned they’d thought through every consequence; prisoners didn’t get out of jail 11 days early, for example. But they ignored the tax payers, who didn’t see why they should pay a year’s tax (due at the end of the year) 11 days early — and didn’t. At that time, New Year was 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation (when Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her she’d be “with child”). So they didn’t pay until 5 April.
From then on, UK tax years ran from 6 April to 5 April the next year. And if you think that’s daft, well you can thank Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and the Pope for it.
I find it fascinating that the Romans, the same people who crushed the Celtic culture of Europe and enslaved so many of the Gauls … are still the source of so many influences in our life. It is a testament to what a great culture and empire it was.
Of course – few of these influences would have survived to this day had the Roman Empire been a “benign” and “loving” one. In fact, an argument could be made that Western Civilization, as we know it today – would never have arisen without Roman’s and their fetish for conquest and domination. It’s even possible that Europe may have had another culture enforced upon it – such as the Mohammedan. The Christian religion sprang up in the Roman Empire – and the Romans had a unique hand in crafting it. Roman military tactics were learned by all of the peoples of the Empire – and these tactics were the seed of even more advanced tactics that were necessary to protect Europe later from invasions. Democracies were born that took lessons from the Roman Republic. And from all of this sprang the Age of Reason.
Wouldn’t have been possible without the brutal seed of Rome. If you were a Gaul in 57 B.C. – all you’d know of the Romans is that they were very advanced and very mean spirited (and very meddling) to your people. Yet, in the context of two thousand years passed since then – it DOES seem that all the heartache was worth it.
Look at the Moors in Spain, and the Ottomans reaching the gates of Vienna to see what nearly happened. But it might not have been so bad. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad saved Greek learning for posterity, and they gave us ‘Arabic’ numerals, even if these were invented in India; and they gave us algebra. The Ottoman Turks were quite remarkably tolerant — far more so than the Christians of the Crusades. After the Jews were expelled from Spain, they found refuge in Constantinople under the Turks. (Sorry, Maggie, for wandering off the point of your post.)
Don’t apologize; I never mind when threads wander organically. What bothers me is when people jump right in from the start with some long-winded thing completely off the subject, using my comment thread as their own personal soapbox. Thank goodness that sort of thing is very rare, because it infuriates me when someone does it.
Since Islam is an offshoot/extension/whatever of Christianity, without Rome, monotheistic religions might not have risen to such prominence and power at all, and the history and present form of the world might be very different indeed.
We might all be drinking happily in Imperial Chinese style brothels, dancing with Geishas or putting our backs out celebrating the latest epub version of the Kama Sutra. We might still be worshipping Eros and Aphrodite, improving our Chi by practising Taoist sex, or cheering our team at the Synchronised Sex event at the Olympics.
And the months of the year might have been named after famous prostitutes and concubines who had given the world the greatest direct and vicarious pleasure.
My cousin was born on a leap day. We used to joke that he was only “4 years old” when he in fact, he was nearly a man.
Krulac, I strongly suggest reading (or watching) Terry Gilliams _Barbarians_ to get further information on that idea. As a bonus, it touches on the Calender of Coligny, a Celtic calender which was much more accurate than the Roman one.
My ancestors came from France and the Scotch Highlands – I have no genetic need for love of the Romans. 🙂
The point I was trying to make is that dynamic and aggressive cultures ALWAYS supplant static and passive ones. Though I wouldn’t really classify the Roman-era Celtic culture as totally static or passive except in relation to the extremely dynamic and aggressive culture of Rome.
I’m not saying necessarily – that the Roman civilization was superior to the Celtic one in anything but a few areas – but those areas were key.
The Gauls were doomed – there is no way that culture could have survived to the present day as the dominant culture of the European continent. They had problems with the Germanic tribes of their day (something that Rome often helped them out with). They certainly would have been overrun by the Mohammedans. The tribal rivalries of the Gauls prevented any other outcome to their destiny other than conquest.
You can have the greatest culture ever produced by mankind – but if you cannot pass it on, it has a serious flaw.
I personally believe that Western civilization is superior in almost every respect to Middle-Eastern civilization and Asian civilization. However, I think that divisions within the West; and failures to live up to the principles of liberty which we, ourselves devised; and a self-loathing for our own culture will result in our being dominated by one or both of those cultures very soon.
My friend Tracy (who I called Middle Sister until she said it was OK to use her name) has an Older Sister who has had thirteen birthdays as of today. I’ve got to call her up and call her jailbait. 😉
LOL!
I wish I could find a DVD of the 1983 version of Pirates Of Penzance. It’s the perfect story for this occasion.
It’s available on Amazon as a instant video.
If they’d gone on naming months after emperors, September would be Caligu. October would be Nero.
You’re forgetting Tiberius and Claudius. September would be Tiber, October Caligu, November Claudy and December Nero.
They’d have had to start breaking months down into smaller bits.