The Rooster Strikes Again!

Today I looked at the calendar and said to myself "Holy crap, it's March! I have to write another rent check already?!"

So the question pops up in my mind, "why is February so short?" So, I started a little research.

No one seems to know the 100% reasoning of the short month, but here are a couple theories:

Theory #1 (though widely believed, historians have marked this one as bunk):

February is so short because the Romans borrowed a day from it to add to August. August was originally a 30-day month called Sextilis, but it was renamed to honor the emperor Augustus Caesar, just as July had earlier been renamed to honor Julius Caesar. Naturally, it wouldn't do to have Augustus' month be shorter than Julius's, hence the switch.

Theory #2 (this one makes the most sense):

The "original" Roman calendar only had 10 months, starting with March and ending with December. Nothing really happened during the winter months, so what we now know as January and February didn't exist, in fact, they were empty. The 8 week period between December and March had no name. Why wasn't this time period named? The calendar was created to govern the cycle of planting and harvesting. At this time, which was about 3000 years ago, the only thing going on was agriculture. Nothing happened in the winter, thus meaning the time between December and March didn't "deserve" to be tracked.

• Sidebar question: If the time between December and March wasn't tracked or named, how did the Romans know when March officially started?

Some time later, a Roman king by the name of Numa Pompilius, had figured out that giving the world a calendar that was missing one sixth of the year didn't make any sense. Pompilius decided that the calendar should consist of 355 days, which was the approximate time it took for 12 lunar cycles. While still not quite accurate, it was at least a step in the right direction. Within the 12 lunar cycles, January and February were added to the end of the calendar year. There were also several "leap days" added to equal out the time it took to appropriately govern the agricultural process.

It's also important to note that the Romans thought even numbers to be unlucky. Pompilius made 31 days out of 7 months and 29 days out of 4 of the months. With the 355 day calendar, this left 28 days remaining, thus requiring one month to have an even number of days (remember, even numbers were unlucky to the Romans). Since the calendar, at this time, started in March and ended in the newly created month of February, it only made since to make the unlucky month the last of the year. Thus February was given 28 days.

In case you wondering:

• It is known that Julius Caesar was the one who later changed the calendar to 365 days, hence the Julian Calendar. This was probably done because having 10 leap days a year just didn't make sense when it was a known fact that it took 365 1/4 days for the Earth to orbit the sun, Even though having "30" days would be an even number (unlucky), it had to happen because, lucky or not, superstition cannot override hard fact.
• Since we couldn't have 365 and "1/4" days in a year, the calendar was changed so that every 4 years, an extra day is added to the shortest month of the year, February. This allows the calendar to catch up on each of the "forgotten" 6 hours of each year, every 4 years.

That, my friends, is useless information that you will probably never be able to apply to anything in your life.

Labels: food for thought, useless info

Posted by Rooster on Friday, March 02, 2007 at 3:01 PM | Permalink