Think Your Calendar is Crazy?

There isn’t a chance that you can get your calendar under control. To begin with, the calendar itself, even without your touching it, is a mess.

Take November, for example, the eleventh month, whose name derives from the Latin novem, meaning “ninth”. In the same vein, September, October, and December respectively derive from septem, octo, and decem, being the seventh, eighth, and tenth months. The early Roman calendar actually had ten months, with a floater for the winter season. They didn’t even want to recognize the cold period with names.

Now, at this point, the fifth month was still called quintilis and the sixth month sextilis, so at least we were consistent. These were later renamed May and June, perhaps a nod to the elders and to the youngsters.

When the Romans finally got around to granting the winter season some respectable names, they introduced January in honor of the god Janus, who had two faces, one looking back and one looking ahead, followed by February, called by the Romans februum, which means “purification”.

So now we had a twelve month, 365 day calendar. Unfortunately, earth’s orbit is ever so slightly more than 365 days, meaning that without adjustment, the seasons gradually get out of adjustment so that August could eventually occur in the dead of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. Determined to get it right, the Emperor Julius Caesar set a team to work to perfect the calendar as best they could, introducing the concept of leap years to keep more closely aligned with the sun.

Now, if you’re the Emperor and you’re creating a new calendar, why not grab a little perpetual glory? Thus Julius inserted his own name for the seventh month. Later, and not to be outdone, Caesar Augustus grabbed his own month.

The Julian calendar, though much improved over most of what came before, worked on the basis that a day is 24 hours, whereas in truth it is 23.262222 hours. Keeping the earth in sync with the sun and the calendar requires inserting an extra day at the end of February every year that is a multiple of 4, except for years divisible by 100 but not also divisible by 400. Thus, 2000 was a leap year, 1900 was not, and 2100 will not be. This system is the Gregorian calendar, more accurate than the Julian, but still not perfect. (I simplify this a little in order to keep to one page!)

So the next time you just can’t get your calendar to work for you, it’s not your fault.