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There are many things to dislike about February and I dislike them all. It’s cold. Short days, long nights. Cloudy, gloomy. And, despite its mercifully limited number of days, the month feels endless.
Of course, for this pedant, the thing that bothers me most is the loss of its first R. This year, I didn’t hear even one example of FEB roo air ee. The “ROO” has been lost to history much like “you’re welcome” and the once-standard use of nominative pronouns to start a sentence. Me [sic] and my puppy hate that. If we’re going to be too lazy to pronounce that first R then let’s change the spelling to FEBUARY. I mean we’ve dropped the TION from such nouns as “invitation” and “consultation”. To me, that’s an irritate. And what about corruptions like “meh”, “diss”, and “obvi”? Pedantry is painful -- like a visit to Minneapolis.
Yet, I should be grateful for the wisdom of the ancients who shortened this dismal month to approximately 28.25 days. Two or three more would be unbearable. How did this happen? It’s a fairly long story but here’s the summary: The ancient Greeks or Romans or Carthaginians or somebody, recognizing the cycle of the seasons, decided to divide the year into 12 months. Why not 13 or 9 I don’t know. Something about the moon’s phases, but those don’t coincide with our months so if that was it, it was poorly considered. Anyway, when you have a number of things you need to count them and that means starting with one. So they decided to start with March. This time it was something to do with the solar equinox. But that comes late in March, so they missed again.
But with March as Month #1, that makes February (appropriately) last. If you don’t believe that March was once first, consider that Sept. (7), Oct. (8), Nov. (9), and Dec. (10) are Latin prefixes. So September was once the seventh, not the ninth month -- and so on.
How about the names of the other months? When you’re the boss, you can effect changes. So Julius Caesar decided he was worthy of a month so that he’d be remembered. He had the Pope change Quintilis, the fifth month, to July.
And, in our part of North America, July is a pretty nice month. Hold on to that nugget --there’s more.
But you’re probably ahead of me now. What about the old sixth month in the Roman calendar, Sextilis?
First consider the number of days in each month back when March was the first of the twelve. The ancients needed to divide 365 days pretty much equally among the twelve months they picked. Well that works if you assign 30 days to seven of them and 31 to the other five. For some reason they gave Quintilis, Sextilis, and February 30 each. Note that that put two consecutive 30s in the summer.
But Julius C, being a wise if egotistical man wanted a nice-weather month but not a short one to be remembered by. So he took a day from February and tacked it onto his month. After the et tu Brutus incident, Caesar Augustus took over and -- sure, he needed a month, too. So he grabbed another day from February and dropped it into August, nee Sextilis.
Thus we have only four 30 day months while the 31s have swelled to seven. And that’s good for us here on The Range because we get two extra nice days in the summer and two fewer February days in the dullness of winter.
That shift is as valid and effective as Daylight Saving Time is at, well, saving daylight.
And that brings me to a remedy for the February Roo Blues. Using the venerable Ely maxim “If a little bit’s good, a lot’s gotta be better” let’s take another day or two or three from pitiful February and drop them into May, June, and September. More nice days, fewer downer days.
And if three days isn’t enough...
Doug Luthanen grew up in Ely and graduated from Memorial High School in 1967. He wrote a weekly viewpoint column for the Northwest Arkansas Times for four years and is an occasional contributor to The Ely Echo.
