Every year it starts in September: A vague discomfort, a sense in the back of my mind that things are not right. Sometimes it doen’t become clear to me until October, when I’m signing a document or writing a letter, and I have to stop and think about the date. October, that’s . . . 10? That can’t be right. . . . And every year around this time I think about starting a thread to see if anyone else notices the incongruity. But I put it off, and then November rolls around, and it doesn’t bother me as much. Plus, I’m starting to get used to it. It starts to bug me again in December, but by then I feel like it’s too late to say anything, and besides, nobody wants their holiday ruined by nerdy jokes about how mathematicians can’t tell Christmas from Halloween because Oct 31=Dec 25. So I suffer in silence, and then it’s January and it really is too late to say anything, so I just bide my time and enjoy the part of the year before the Romans got too depressed by the gloomy weather to come up with actual names for the months any more.
But not this year! This year I’m going to speak out while it’s still relevant. It’s October! October, dammit! How can it be the tenth month, when it’s October? It doesn’t make sense!!! Why couldn’t they have renamed them when they moved New Year’s to January? If not they should just accept that September is 7, October is 8, November is 9, and December is 10, and if that means that New Year’s Day is 11/1, so be it! Anything else is just madness!
Yes, it bothers me a little bit. Apparently not as much as it bothers you, but it’s like that nagging itch that I can’t quite reach.
My go-to solution for this type of situation is usually emailing the King of Norway (as a Norwegian, my belief that the King can do anything if he can just be bothered is unshakable). I’ve considered asking him to move New Year’s back to March. I haven’t done it yet, though, as I was a bit put off by the lack of response when I asked if he could get rid of daylight saving time.
However, if we could get a petition together, maybe he would listen…
The September == 9 thing doesn’t bug me; it’s just a useless artifact like an appendix. The months near January or December are easy for me; it’s the ones in the middle – June, July, August – where I have to hesitate for a moment to figure out the number. Perhaps the homophonic mnemonic "August = “Octus” would help.
Be thankful you don’t contend in Thailand where three different days are called “New Year’s Day.” :smack: January 1, Buddhist Tet (usually February), and the mid-April Water Festival (though I’ve only heard the April Holiday called "New Year’s in Northern Thailand.)
To add further confusion, vestiges of an obsolescent fourth calendar persist in a song played incessantly at the November Full Moon; it equates November == 12th month and Thais often use that as a reference. :smack:
I studied the history of the calendar for an assignment in High School, and learned a hell of a lot of fascinating stuff, but it wasn’t until recently that I realised why it’s February that has only 28 days. And that is because it used to be the last month of the year. I knew that, and yet I didn’t make the connection.
Or the fact that Augustus was also Octavian.
Whenever I think about those number-based month names, I always think of something that I think a teacher told me very early in school:
- The Romans used to have a ten-month year, before months were added in the summer to honor Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. That’s why their year ended with December. :smack:
I think I believed that for a few years before I learned the more sensible explanation
Because the name of the tenth month is “October.”
The original meaning of any word is irrelevant to its current meaning:
A turtle is an amphibian, even though its original meaning was a type of bird.
A building can have a westward orientation, even though “orient” means “east.”
A mouse is a small rodent; current wireless mice have nothing in common with them.
It’s called “football” in the US, even though the feet are not usually used to advance the ball.
What bugs me about this month thing is that this may be the tenth month of the year, but it is not called “10”. As in 10/18/2013 (or 18/10/2013). It’s 18 October (or October 18). I’m even willing to use three character names, if used in columns, or abbreviations for the longer names. And somewhere in April through July I have to count on my fingers what month number it is, because the computer can’t be bothered with such details.
I suspect this is an archaism from the beginning of the computer accounting age, when it was simpler to numberize the months than write a little subroutine that converts a number to name, or even a three character name. (Yeah, I know, it really was a memory problem in the very beginning, but what is it now? Tradition?) And automatically organize it properly, not alphabetically, so I can sort things by date properly on my computer. Why do I have to do all the work, and not the computer?
That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the centuries thing. Whenever someone mentions, say, the seventeenth century, I have to stop for a minute and do some mental calculations: “That’s the 1700s—no, wait, that’s one off; it’s either the 1600s or the 1800s…”
Blame Numa Pompilis.
Originally, it went something like this, with some 51 days of un-monthed time during winter.
March (Martius)
April (Aprilius)
May (Maius)
June (Iunius)
Quintilis
Sextilis
September
October
November
December
Then under Numa Pompilis in roughly 710 BC, the Romans shrunk the months by a day or two, and added those days to the 51 days, and split that time up into 2 new months giving us January and February. There’s when your months got out of whack.
Of course, this wasn’t actually astronomically accurate, so every so often they added another month into the calendar (decided by the Pontifex Maximus) to straighten things out. This month was called Intercalaris or Mercedonius, and in effect was a “leap month”.
Julius Caesar straightened this out somewhat by regularizing it to a 12 month year of 365 days, but this means that the Julian calendar gains about 3 days every 400 years or so.
Somewhere after that, the months of Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar respectively, giving us June and July instead.
Pope Gregory reformed the Julian calendar by more accurately inserting the leap days so that things like Easter, the Equinoxes and Solstices don’t move around on the calendar.
And that children, is why Oktoberfest actually starts in mid-September.
… and maybe why Christmas sales start right after school starts? 
I thought Oktoberfest started early because no one wants to be late for Oktoberfest.
The centuries thing is a bother, too, don’t get me wrong. But I have to deal with “10” and all those other months on a daily basis. For centuries I just think of Walter Cronkite’s tv show “21st Century” and remember that that future stuff is now this century, then work backwards.
A turtle is not an amphibian. It is a reptile.
Is that really fair? We don’t have a lot of independent corroboration for this factoid, and what information we do have is several hundred years out. “October” looked even more eight-like to Numa and his contemporaries than it did to us. Also, naming the eleventh month of twelve for the god of doorways and thresholds seems odd if the only new year begins three quarters of the way through March. I’m not disputing your reporting of the facts, but they’ve always seemed to be a poor explanation.
I’m curious about January and February being the last two months of the year. Why were they changed after they were added by Numa? Also, if January wasn’t the first month originally (i.e., from its origin, not the calendar’s), why was it named after Janus, the god of doorways?
@Bump – you meant July and August, right? Also, there were many Popes Gregory. The calendar was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII. I’m persnickety about Gregs of history.
Well, if Livy isn’t good enough for you, I don’t know who would be.
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Roman_calendar.html
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/romancalendar.html
Livy (AUC 1.19) says that Numa divded the year into twelve months. It’s Momsen who says that January was originally added as an eleventh month, and I’m not sure what he’s basing that on, precisely.
No the Julian calendar had Leap Years and a Feb 29th every fourth year so it was 365 1/4 days long on average. It loses (lags behind) 3 days every 400 years (approximately). The Gregorian Calendar eliminated 3 leap days every 400 years by removing them in those century years not divisible by 400.
When I wrote “more accurately inserting”, I meant that the Gregorian calendar handles leap years and days better than the Julian, just as you describe.
Since my birthday is on the very first day of October, there are other things that upset me . . . like the fact that all of a sudden I’m a whole year older.
So if it really bothers you that much, have some cake.