Blue Moons and Cecil and tomorrow

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Between today and tomorrow and the next day, you will probably hear or read a news story about how we are getting a “Blue Moon” tomorrow, the 31st of May. Don’t believe it.

Even though Cecil first reported on this in 1977, and the column was updated, the press and the public still believe that all a Blue Moon means is a second full moon in the same month. Not true.

At least NPR got a leg up on interviewing the editor of Sky & Telescope on the radio this afternoon. But if you use Google News, you’ll likely throw up your hands.

Nothing earthshaking, just trying to get ahead of this event.

2

I had some Bleu Cheese on my burger tonight, and I rarely do that at home because i hardly ever have that sitting around when I make burgers.

Does that count?

Does it count if I now go moon someone?

3

I noticed the ‘blue moon’ reference in a newspaper article a couple of days ago referring to the upcoming pair of full moons that we’ll be getting in Sydney in June. My astronomical wall calendar pours scorn on the notion.

4

Blue Moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue Moon
You know just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for

:smiley:

5

I wrote an article on this for OPN a while back, emphasizing the light-scattering aspect, of course, but talking about the usages of the phrase as well. I relied upon the Sky and Telescope artiicles, and the SD, and others, of course.
My thoughts:

1.) It’s not “a” Blue Moon. The original usage is to call that lunar month “Blue Moon” because it needs a name. The other moons in the Almanac each had names associated with the month – “Hunter’s Moon”, “Pink Moon”, etc. Every now and then you get four full moons in a season rather than the usual three. If you just continue to name them in order, then eventually “Harvest Moon” would start to wander through the year, being in Summer, then Spring, instead of being in the Autumn (where it belongs) all the time. So you need to throw in an eextra “named” month. The Jewish calendar has been doing this for a long time. They just repeat the name of the month, however. If the Almanac did it, they’d have, say, Hunter’s Moon followed by Hunter’s Moon.

2.) They don’t want to do this. So they call the extra month “Blue Moon”. It’s not “a” “Blue Moon”, as in a descriptive term. They call the month “Blue Moon” because that’s the standard name they use for such intercalary months.

3.) As far as I can tell, this is a Farmer’s Almanac thing. Although there are systems of naming months (The Jewish lunar calendar, the Islamic Calendar), we in greater Western Civ don’t really have a fixed set of names for the months. American Indians did, IIRC, but they don’t have a fixed set, either. The whole “Hunter’s Moon”, “Harvest Moon”, “Wolf Moon” thing sounds like it’s a piece of authentic historic lore, but it’s not. As far as I can telll, the names are the creation of Farmer’s Almanac. So when S&T got it wrong in 1946, they screwed up a magazine’s naming philosophy. They weren’t showing colossal ignorance of a cultural meme.

4.) Since they got it wronmg, a lot of people haver been using it that way, and the usage has passed into commonly received wisdom. For better or for worse, irt seems to me, “Blue moon” = “second full moon in a month” is as legit as any other mistake in the language that’s been ratified by time. There are a lot of those. Look up the history of “Item”.

5.) Those who pedantically claim that people are incorrectly using the term because that’s not what “a” Blue Moon is probably don’t properly understand the meaning of the term themselves, or they wouldn’t be using that indefinite article. See above.

6

Thanks silenus (and Rogers and Hart)…

And then suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms could ever hold
I heard somebody whisper ‘please adore me’
But when I looked, that moon had turned to gold

Blue moon
Now I’m no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

7

I wonder if the 1937 Old Farmer’s mention was inspired by Lost Horizon and its tale of the Paradise of the Blue Moon. The novel was written in 1933 and was made into a movie in 1937.

In related news, former Oakland A’s pitcher John “Blue Moon” Odom turned 62 on Tuesday.

8

No – The Farmer’s Almanac goes back to the 18th century, and has been using the term “Blue Moon” for most, if not all, of its life. If anything, James Hilton would’ve taken it from the FA. The term “Blue Moon” goes back even farther than that. I think the OED credits it with a citation in the 17th cetury or earlier.

A lot of people don’t think that the term has anything to do with the meteorological phenomenon of a literal Blue Moon, but to me the fact that such anomalous scattering does exist, causing blue and green moons (and, much more often, blue and greenm suns) strongly implies that the term really does come from observations of such moons. They are rare, though. You’ll get “Blue Moons” in both senses (two fulls in a month or four fulls in a season) a LOT more often than you’ll get anomalous scattering by immense forest fire clouds or the like.

9

It’s another media type problem like when the millenium occurs. We’ll be right, they’ll be wrong, but it won’t matter, because they’ll always be only right once in a blue moon.

10

Well, heck, there are only arguments about when a century ends every 100 years (even less often, if you belueve Stephen Jay Gould’s essay – he seems to imply that everyone understood how this worked until 1900 and then 2000 rolled around), and for a millenium it’s every 1000 years. But even a meteorological (scattering) Blue Moon happens more often than once every century, and the calendrical kinds every few years.

11

:eek:

12

I heard that story on NPR last night while I was driving home, and had some ignorance fought. Amusingly enough, this morning on Morning Edition (also NPR), they mentioned that tonight there will be a blue moon. So I guess there are two options: (1) The folks at All Things Considered have declared war on Morning Edition and are going out of their way to make each other look silly, or (2) tonight the moon will turn to Blue Cheese.

I’m hoping for option 2.