Radio Station KOIT, SF, CA.US told me today that they didn’t start inserting extra days in leap years until 1946. Is that true?
BTW, why do they call it ‘leap year’ anyhow? If you insert an extra day, you are delaying completion of the year, aren’t you?
Ray (Laggin’ lizards, Annie!)
The radio station was pulling your leg. The leap year was part of the Gregorian calendar, which was established hundreds of years ago (and it was in other calendars much earlier – the Jewish calendar has a lot of leap years). Rossini was born on February 29, 1792.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
But the second part of the OP is still valid. We’re not leaping over anything! We’re slowing down the year to allow for the quarter-days that we’ve been ignoring for the past four years.
I’ve been wondering this for years!
By the way, as Chuck mentioned, other calendars have been doing this for much longer than the Gregorians have. The Jewish and Chinese calendar years are normally made up of 12 lunar months, which comes to about 354 days, and so to compensate, 7 years out of each 19 are made of 13 months. I don’t know about Chinese, but in Hebrew this is called a “shana m’oobar”, literally, a “pregnant year” — which is a heckuva lot more sensible than a leap year!
“You can be smart or pleasant. For years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.”
Elwood P. Dowd
The Julian calendar also had leap years - Julius Caesar may have got the idea from the Egyptians. The problem with the Julian calendar is that it had too many leap years; the Gregorian has three fewer per four hundred years.
and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel to toe
I know they took pains to compensate for the extra fractional day per year way back then, but did they, perhaps, do it differently before 1946. Actually, I must agree that I think that light-rock station was off its light rocker.
Ray (Hey, I started long before then, and I don’t remember any change, but I don’t specifically remember “leap” days from back then.)
The civilized western world has used almost exactly the same calendar since 45 B.C, and the last change in the English-speaking world was in 1752.
And virtually all calendars have some kind of leap something, though the usual plan is strategically inserted leap months.
I’m not sure how “leap” became the word, but it was originally slang; the original term was “bissextile”, because the original leap-year day was not done by creating February 29, but by having February 24 twice, which the Romans called “6 days before March 1,” because they counted down. (Yes, I know it’s 5 days before March 1 in English. Latin idiom counts both ends of an interval: 2/24, 2/25, 2/26, 2/27, 2/28, 3/1 – six days.) Why was this day chosen? Because in the old Roman calendar, that was where the leap month went. Why? Lost in the mists of time…
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams