How February is a rip-off: Let us count the days
PHIL ROSENTHAL - Chicago Tribune
February is a rip-off.
It’s a scam posing as a month.
Your February passes, memberships, cable bill, rent, retainers —
even in a leap year, such as 2016, when you get an extra day
— routinely deliver less bang for your buck than they should.
You can rationalize February in your mind by saying these payments
even out over a 12-month-year. You might choose to note that some 30-day
months also have as few as 20 weekdays and even some 31-day months have
as few as eight weekend days.
Even on that basis, however, you get less time to cobble together
your payments due in March than you would if February weren’t shorting
you on days.
Meanwhile, some months have has many as 10 weekend days and 23
weekdays. February only has four weekends and either 20 or 21 weekdays.
It’s the Monday of months (can’t trust that day).
Let’s be clear: February’s length is not among the world’s biggest
problems. Given time and temperature, for example, temperature needs
attention first. Yet when it comes to the calendar year, things move
glacially slow — slower actually.
The Gregorian calendar we currently embrace dates back more than 400
years to Pope Gregory XIII. It was meant to supplant the Julian calendar
that Julius Caesar introduced in 46 B.C., which was seen as having too
many leap days.
The British Empire (including the future United States) didn’t make
the switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Greece held out until
the 1920s, and there remain countries such as Nepal and Saudi Arabia
that don’t use it.
But every calendar year here in America, February takes us for a
ride, and we choose to ignore it like some beloved movie’s gaping plot hole.
Consider the calendar we now have. Go ahead, sing the little song to
yourself if it helps — “Thirty days hath September …” — we’ll wait.
We hath seven months with 31 days, four with 30 and then there’s
this scrawny cheat of 28 days, 29 tops.
If January gave up a day on one side and March a day on the other,
they and February would all have 30 days in most years. That would
result in a more equitable mix of seven 30-day months and five 31-day
months, which would even to six and six when a 31st day is added to
February or some other month in leap years.
The leap day could go wherever you want it, frankly.
You also could beef up February with days from wherever you want.
From a productivity standpoint, taking a day from December would
shorten up what’s a slack week at the end of the year anyway, what with
schools and some businesses closed.
In the scheme of things, these would be minor fixes. But they’re
long overdue. February has been short for a very long time, no matter
the origin story you believe.
One, discredited in some circles, is that it lost a day in the
Julian calendar to add to August in honor of Augustus Caesar.
Another version says the 28-day February dates to the eighth century
B.C. with the arrival of the first basic Roman calendar to not
completely ignore the time when we now have January and February.
(Romans were all about farming, so who needed the dead of winter?)
Even with a full 12 months, the math of this calendar was flawed
with only 355 days and a mix of 31-day and 29-day months. One shorter
month was needed to make the numbers work the way they wanted. February
was the last month of their year, so it took the hit.
Yeah. Makes perfect sense.
Just to give you some idea of how big a hassle it can be to redo
these things, Caesar ordered a 445-day transitional year in switching to
the Julian calendar.
With the switch to the Gregorian calendar and moving the start of
the year to Jan. 1 from the spring here in the British colonies, 1751
was only about nine months long, and the day after Sept. 2, 1752, was Sept.
14.
Think of all that the world went through because of Y2K fears, and
imagine what changing the calendar today might entail. Just keeping up
with the latest date for daylight saving time is hard enough. So
reallocating a couple of days to make February a grownup month might be
too much to bear.
Besides, more people seem upset that the February birthdays of
Abraham Lincoln and George Washington have been combined into a single
holiday, Presidents Day.
It bears mentioning from time to time that, per Section 6103(a) of
Title 5 of the U.S. Code designating federal holidays, this day off is
still identified only as “Washington’s Birthday” even though it rarely
falls on the anniversary of the day Washington was born.
Which was either Feb. 11, 1731, or Feb. 22, 1732, depending on which
calendar you use.
February clearly is not to be trusted. philrosent...@tribpub.com
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
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Duane Whittingham - N9SSN
(ARES/RACES, EmComm, Skywarn & Red Cross)
http://www.radiodude.info
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