Take a flying leap

Barton reminds me that we are living in a bissextile year, and that, as a result, tomorrow will be an intercalary day.

In other words, Happy Leap Year!

Why "bissextile"? "Bis" means "two" or "twice," and "sex" means, among other things, "six." In Latin, of course. What does "twice six" have to do with leap year? The Romans, like us, realized that the year was 365 1/4 years long, and that an extra day was needed every four years to keep Christmas (or rather Saturnalia) from eventually being celebrated in the summer. We tidy things up by tacking on a 29th day to February. The Romans, on the other hand, after Julius Caesar's calendar reform adopting the "Julian Calendar," simply repeated February 24th twice. But the Romans couldn't shake their fondness for an ancient and complicated system of naming their dates that derived from their misty ancient history. Rather than simply call the 24th of February "February 24," as we so cleverly do, they called it the Sixth of the Calends of March ("ante diem sextum Kalendas Martii") (abbreviated "more simply" to "a. d. VI Kal. Mar"), which translates to "the sixth day before the first day of March."

Therefore, a leap year was a year in which the Sixth of the Calends of March occurred twice. The day, on its second go-around, was called "ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martii," meaning the Second Sixth of the Calends of March. "Bissextile." Voilá!

The second Sixth of the Calends of March in a bissextile year was an "intercalary" day -- a date inserted into the calendar. As is our February 29.

Of course, the year isn't really 365 1/4 days long, regardless of what your fifth grade teacher told you. It's actually 11 minutes shorter than that. Those minutes began adding up, so that by 1582 the calendar was 10 days out of whack. Pope Gregory XIII put a stop to all that by jumping the world ahead 10 days to synchronize the calendar with the real world again. He also fine tuned the system to avoid the same problem in the future by decreeing that century years would no longer be leap years after all, unless divisible by 400. Therefore, 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 was not, and 2100 will not be. If you were born in 1892, you didn't experience a leap year until the year you turned 8.

So y'all enjoy your intercalary day tomorrow. Me? Well, payday is the last day of the month, so for me it just means waiting one more agonizing day before I get my paycheck.