“Our feeble
ways of counting time, with a curious mixture of Roman/Greek/Julian/Gregorian
elements in our calendar, none the less has powerful symbolic value.” So wrote Professor
James Tabor, of the University of North Carolina, in his brief New Year’s Day blog https://jamestabor.com/
His point is well taken. Our
calendar is a mess, but it is still our calendar. This curious mixture of
religious, secular and meteorological data has a hoary history. Most confusing
of all its strange details is this month, February 2016.
This ancient rhyme about it was one of our early childhood
learnings about the calendar.
Thirty days
hath September,
April,
June and November;
excepting leap year, once in
four,
February
has one day more.
There have been various alternative English versions over the
centuries. A Latin version has been dated as far back as 1488.
The Weather Network, Canada’s
most quoted source of weather information, a posted very helpful article that
explains why 2016 is another leap year.
As the ancient rhyme states the term comes from the necessary addition of an
extra day every four years to account for the fact that each day is only 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds
long, not 24 hours. That is how long it actually takes our planet Earth to make
one revolution on its axis. Over the years that brief daily gap in time keeps
adding up.
A solar year, the time it takes for the earth to make its
annual orbit of the sun from one spring equinox to the next, takes actually 5
hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds longer. To keep the measurement of years on the calendar in synch
with the actual length of the solar year, we “leap over” one day every fourth
year. If we didn’t, our calendar would become out of order with the actual
seasons by as much as one month every 125 years. It has all happened before.
That is why we have to correct our calendar every now and then.
For all the details, see this very detailed and diagramed
posting:
So why don’t we change the way we count time? That’s another subject
altogether.
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