October has a pretty useless name.
Evidently, it used to be the eighth month, Octo being the root meaning "eight", back when we hadn't quite invented the wonders that are January and February. Thank goodness we (humanity) got around to that, who knows where we would be if these two completely, genuinely fantastic months were never imagined. Think of it! If there were no January...WAIT. Nothing of consequence at all would happen. But what of February, surely our comrade cannot disappear without a cosmic misalignment of insurmountable gravity! OH WAIT February is completely useless too.
So, we're left with a misnamed month. For ALL ETERNITY. IRONICALLY, January, one of those throwaway months that the Romans didn't quite get around to inventing right away, has one of the more interesting and more thought-provoking original stories. You see, Janus was the god of the doorway in Roman mythology, the gatekeeper. January, thus, becomes the gate-keeping month of the new year. Much, much cooler than a misnamed misfit of a month, of whom the only distinguishing characteristic seems to be that various horticulture begins to rapidly wither and die, and there's a day at the end of the month where public (female) nudity and eating massive amounts of product with massive amounts of high fructose corn syrup is appropriate.
OCTO=EIGHT.
Perhaps we should call this linguistic nightmare "Dectober". But wait, hold on one moment. Could it be that December....YES. Don't tell me! YES. The prefix "Dec" means TEN. Check your calendars lads and lassies, December is the TWELFTH month of the "modern" calendar.
Is nobody else offended by this? Am I shouting eternally, soundlessly into a void into which no one else will command their spirits, their collective will? As luck will have it, I will one day perish, and will no longer be alive to be offended by this cavalcade of ceaseless suffering. I'm glad that this will be at a soonish period, because I don't want to be around when they add even more months, because you know they will. They'll have to, Winter will end because humanity as deemed it appropriate to choke the planet with hydrochlorofluorocarbons and the like. The winter months will become irrelevant, and Humans will try to comfort themselves by adding new, less season-dependent months.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
:-( I didn't know those facts about the nomenclature of months, now it's going to bother me all the time! Halloween isn't so bad though, it's an opportunity to truly innovate while everyone else is upsetting.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing "November" means the ninth month.
Maybe the new months they add will be cooler?