“They just added an extra five days of festivals, of partying...”

February 29, 2016 5:27 AM

The Surprising History Behind Leap Year by Brian Handwerk [National Geographic]

The ancient Egyptians did it, and so do we. Here's how a leap day—which occurs Februrary 29—helps keep our calendars and societies in sync. It's that time again: This Monday, February 29, is a leap day, the calendar oddity that occurs (almost) every four years. For centuries, trying to sync calendars with the length of the natural year caused confusion—until the concept of leap year provided a way to make up for lost time.

Related:

- The Secret Jewish History of Leap Year by Seth Rogovoy [Forward]

The Hebrew calendar is a bit more complex, being a “lunisolar” calendar that simultaneously is dependent upon cycles of the moon to measure months and cycles of the sun to measure the lengths of the day and the year. This might not intrinsically be such a big deal, but when your religious obligations include blessing and sanctifying each new month, it’s pretty important to get the timing of the months correct.

- Leap year: Because the solar system doesn’t care about our calendar. by Joss Fong [Vox]

This fact has been vexing humans for centuries: Earth's year (one orbit around the sun) isn't neatly divisible by its day (one rotation about its axis). One full orbit takes more than 365 days but less than 366. That's not surprising — there's no reason for the two to be linked. The trouble comes when we try to overlay a useful calendar onto this random system. And as a result, our annual calendar is always slightly wrong.As the short video shows [YouTube], leap year is our jury-rigged solution to this problem. To nudge our calendar closer to accuracy, we simply stick an extra day at the end of February every four years. Without it, our calendar would slowly shift further and further from the true year.

- How Do You Celebrate A Leap Year Birthday? [NPR]

Once every four years, people born on Feb. 29 actually get to celebrate their birthday. That's right, Monday is leap day, the extra day added every fourth year to help fix the problem that while our calendar year is 365 days, the solar year — the amount of time it takes the Earth to circle the sun — is 365.24219 days. NPR asked to hear from you leap babies about how you usually celebrate, and here's what some of you said.

- Why Women Proposing Is Still Rare by Alix Strauss [The New York Times]

When uttered by a man, the words “will you marry me” serve to signal a tradition that is both widely accepted and ages old. Having the same spoken by a woman however — except in a leap year like 2016, when an old Irish tradition of having the woman ask is known to emerge — are still surprisingly rare. Legend has it that “The Ladies’ Privilege,” as it was known then, originated in the fifth century, with an Irish nun later known as St. Brigid. Through her intervention it was decided that on Feb. 29, women would be given the opportunity to pop the question as a way to balance traditional gender roles in a manner not unlike how leap year serves to balance the calendar.

- Random Facts About Leap Years [The Telegraph]

1. Queen Margaret of Scotland was apparently five years old when she came up with the notorious February 29 proposal trap.
2. If a man did refuse the proposal, he would be fined a kiss, a silk dress or twelve pairs of gloves.
3. Women either have to wear breeches or a scarlet petticoat to pop the question, according to tradition.
4. One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year. They believe it is bad luck.
5. People born on February 29 are called "leaplings" or "leapers".
6. The poet Lord Byron was born on a Leap Day.
7. So was the rapper Ja Rule.
8. The plot of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance revolved around Frederic's discovery that, because he is a leapling, he must remain apprenticed to pirates and serve another 63 years before he can join Mabel, his one true love.
9. Anthony, Texas is the self-proclaimed "Leap Year Capital of the World". It holds a festival which includes a guided trip to Aztec Cave, "fun at the horse farm" and square dancing.
10. Parties are sometimes thrown to celebrate leap days. There is no special leap day food but if there was, it would probably be frog’s legs.
11. Matthew Goode, the British film star who acted in the film Leap Year, said he knew the movie would be remembered as the "worst film of 2011" but wanted to be "close to home and able to visit his girlfriend and newborn daughter."
12. February 29 also marks Rare Disease Day.
13. Today you are working for free if you're on a fixed annual wage.
14. Astrologers believe people born on February 29 have unusual talents, such as the ability to burp the alphabet or paint like Picasso.
15. Mitsukuni "honey" Haninozuka, the manga and anime character born on a leap day, likes sweets, cake and stuffed toys. It is joked that, although he's 17, he's really six years old.
16. Hugh Hefner opened his first Playboy Club on February 29 1960.
17. The character Leap Day William who appeared in an episode of 30 Rock wears blue and yellow.
18. The French call leapfrog "saute-mouton", which translates literally as "leap sheep".
19. The frog is a symbol associated with February 29. The Australian rocket frog can leap over two metres.
[Apparently The Telegraph cannot count. The link has a headline that reads: Top 20 craziest facts about leap years. But clicking on the link, I noticed that fact number eleven is missing. I have corrected this.]

- Leap year fear: a literary history of women proposing marriage. by Moira Redmond [The Guardian]

Today is 29 February, so it is Bachelor’s Day: the one day every four years where women are encouraged to ask men to marry them. Aside from the newspaper stunts every leap year, there don’t seem to be many actual instances of this happening in popular culture. It is the case in literature, too: it is simply rare to find women in books proposing marriage any day of the year. [...] Even if they don’t do the proposing, there is a consistent thread of strong women pushing to make their intentions clear in life and literature. In the Old Testament, a widow and her mother-in-law conspire to put the younger woman in the way of Boaz, who will marry her and assure their future. Many of Shakespeare’s heroines could be quite fearless in pursuit of love – Juliet, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Rosalind in As You Like It all find their husbands without waiting around to be chosen.

- Lear Year 2016 [Google Doodle]

posted by Fizz (39 comments total)

From the NG article:

The practice of adding extra days to the year is at least as old as these 360-day systems. “When the Egyptians adopted this calendar they were aware that there was a problem, but they didn't add any more days to the calendar,” says Lowe. “They just added an extra five days of festivals, of partying, at the end of the year.”

We're clearly doing this 'Leap Year' thing wrong. I vote for five days of festivals/partying.
posted by Fizz at 5:36 AM on February 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Picasso could burp the alphabet? And I'd thought Guernica was his greatest work.
posted by XMLicious at 5:52 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

[Apparently The Telegraph cannot count. The link has a headline that reads: Top 20 craziest facts about leap years. But clicking on the link, I noticed that fact number eleven is missing. I have corrected this.]

Top 20 lists have 20 entries, except on February 29th in years divisible by 32, unless the year is also divisible by 9, unless the year is also divisible by 7.
posted by Etrigan at 5:59 AM on February 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Just as Christmas has Santa Claus and Easter has the Easter Bunny, this, the holiest of days has Leap Day William, who lives in the Mariana Trench and trades candy for children's tears. (You may recall the movie, starring Jim Carrey and Andie Macdowell.)
posted by Guy Smiley at 6:01 AM on February 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Real life is for March!
posted by bondcliff at 6:03 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I have a buddy who just celebrated his 8th birthday party.

I've always been fascinated with the story of committing a heist on leap day because the computers couldn't do something or other. "In a world where Jon Hamm and Liev Schrieber rob a bank on February 29th..."
posted by Sphinx at 6:14 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

In college, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and roommate decided to take February 29th to do something we wouldn't do on a normal day. Our decision was to take the public transit (Metra) as far as we could, to the end of the line on the other side of the city. That put us in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where it was a Sunday in February, everything was closed and it was pretty cold. We spent the day there, but beyond my wife getting to see her first live bait vending machine, I don't remember much about it specifically. It was still fun though, and I wish I was doing something like that right now instead of working.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:26 AM on February 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

It's really a damn shame that it isn't a national holiday.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:29 AM on February 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

I've posted it before, but it's relevant, so here's Dave Gorman's attempt to fix the calendar.
posted by pipeski at 6:33 AM on February 29, 2016

Between times, I think, "meh", but on the day, I agree with Rock Steady. FEELS like a holiday.
posted by cookie-k at 6:38 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've posted it before, but it's relevant, so here's Dave Gorman's attempt to fix the calendar.

I really like that, actually, though I think to make it more palatable, we keep July and August and the now-nonsensical September, October, etc. Also, the logistics involved in changing the start of the new year from Jan to Mar seem almost insurmountable, so that stays. The only thing is, you need a way to denote The Intermission in a MM/DD/YY (or whatever) notation, because even if it's one big party, you are still going to have hospitals and airports and fire stations that will still be doing business. I'm OK with 14/01/16 (and 14/02/16 every four years).
posted by Rock Steady at 6:42 AM on February 29, 2016

Wait, am I going to have to re-live this whole day over and over again until I learn a lesson about true love?
posted by sexyrobot at 6:48 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Picasso could burp the alphabet? And I'd thought Guernica was his greatest work.

This made me snort!
posted by sutt at 6:49 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The leap year as currently implemented is rather clever. In the Julian calendar, you slipped a "day" -- that is, the day an equinox or solstice occurs on the calendar. Over time, you'd end up with December in summer. With the Gregorian calendar's leap rules (every four years, except centuries that are not divisible by 400) you end up slipping one day every 3330 years, but because of the precession of the equinox, the day the equinox is also moving, and it is moving in the right direction, so you actually 1 day in about 7700 years. Theoretically, you could make it even better by skipping years that divide evenly into 4000, but at that point, the changing length of a day is significant enough that any correct you try to postulate now is likely to be incorrect when it actually occurs. Over the timescale that you'd be "correct", there'd be enough change in the length of the day and the precession of the equinox that you'd probably be wrong.

The right answer is to stick with our current rule until we've slipped a day even with the leap year, then declare the next century that normally wouldn't have been a leap year a leap year again. Once the day's length has changed enough, you'd be leaping every year, so at that point, the leap year can go away -- but that's a long ways into the future.
posted by eriko at 7:03 AM on February 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

This system produces an average year length of 365.2425 days, just half a minute longer than the solar year. At such a rate it will take 3,300 years before the Gregorian calendar moves even a day from our seasonal cycle. That means future generations will have a decision to make on leap year, though not for a long time. “So 3,000 years from now, people may decide to tweak it," Lowe says. "We'll just have to wait and see.”

Also, isn't that why we add leap seconds every so often?
posted by Rock Steady at 7:03 AM on February 29, 2016

I've posted it before, but it's relevant, so here's Dave Gorman's attempt to fix the calendar.

The unworkable part is that 13 isn't divisible by anything whereas 12 months breaks down into halves and quarters and even thirds. I think Mayans and others had the right idea with breaking the days down into 360+5 because 360 is so wonderfully divisible. Just deal with the extra 5 to 6 and call them the Intermission.
posted by vacapinta at 7:04 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

In college, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and roommate decided to take February 29th to do something we wouldn't do on a normal day.

Yeah, yeah, I can't wait to hear it...

Our decision was to take the public transit (Metra) as far as we could, to the end of the line on the other side of the city... to see her first live bait vending machine

What a letdown. :(
posted by fairmettle at 7:07 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dang, I just remembered that last leap day I had resolved to never work another leap day in order to reclaim the precious bonus hours that rightfully belong to the workers. And yet here I am working for free today like a chump. And next leap year falls on a Saturday! I'm going to set a calendar reminder for 2024.
posted by ghharr at 7:08 AM on February 29, 2016

I get paid every two weeks so I guess that I do get paid for my work today.
posted by octothorpe at 7:18 AM on February 29, 2016

AWT: Apple serves up five free iOS games to celebrate Leap Year (actually only two are games.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:32 AM on February 29, 2016

Also, isn't that why we add leap seconds every so often?

Leap seconds are introduced because the Earth's rotation isn't perfect:

Leap seconds are irregularly spaced because the Earth's rotation speed changes irregularly. Indeed, the Earth's rotation is quite unpredictable in the long term, which explains why leap seconds are announced only six months in advance.

posted by Etrigan at 7:39 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

so here's Dave Gorman's attempt to fix the calendar.

Check out the World Seasonal Calendar, also permanently fixing all dates to the same day of the week.

In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1 (due to December 1 being the 73rd day of the 4th quarter). An extra 'year day' is added for a total of 365 days.[69]
posted by Brian B. at 7:42 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm extra grateful for leap year this year. As a banker, we close for holidays when the Federal Reserve closes, and the Fed closes Mondays for Sunday holidays, but doesn't close Friday for Saturday holidays. If this year hadn't been a leap year, both Christmas and New Year's Day would have been on Saturdays.
posted by skycrashesdown at 7:46 AM on February 29, 2016

I like the idea that the Pope was able to exercise authority over the calendar not because of his Christian status, but because he was Pontifex Maximus, a Roman priestly role exercised by Julius Caesar, incorporated into the office of Emperor and passed on to the Papacy by Constantine. And in fact, not a Roman institution either, but one inherited by them from the Etruscans.

So basically we're still relying on the calendar-adjusting authority of the Etruscan priesthood.
posted by Segundus at 7:54 AM on February 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

The correct way to celebrate leap year is yelling at no one in particular "AL! WHY HAVEN'T I LEAPED YET?" Do this in every different setting you find yourself in today.
posted by Ferreous at 8:15 AM on February 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh boy!
posted by Fizz at 9:02 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

13. Today you are working for free if you're on a fixed annual wage. That's a fact?
15. Mitsukuni "honey" Haninozuka, the manga and anime character born on a leap day, likes sweets, cake and stuffed toys. It is joked that, although he's 17, he's really six years old.
So he was born on Feb 29, 1999? And there have been 6 leap years since then?
posted by MtDewd at 9:02 AM on February 29, 2016

Hey, it's my eighth birthday! 🎉🎉🎉

I don't get a birthday very often so I'm partying extra-hard.
posted by pmdboi at 9:09 AM on February 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Both the missus and the offspring have birthdays in the next week, but both were born in leap years and both were due in the 29th of Feb. I guess what I am saying is in a slightly different world I would be married to a 13-year-old with a five-year-old daughter, which is all kinds of wrong.

Although we are only talking about Feb 29th here, I could talk about calendar adjustments for a lot longer than normal people. One of my favourite bits is that despite all the changes (like the multiple days being skipped at the shift from Julian to Gregorian), we have never skipped days of the week. That is to say, when Spain and Portugal shifted to Gregorian in 1582, Thursday the 4th of October was followed by Friday the 15th, not the Monday the 15th that would have occurred without the shift (and which did occur in England, say). Presumably this means that the seven-day pattern entends back into prehistory, even though no one was naming the weekdays yet. It is odd to think of the bolide impacting Chicxulub and ending the Cretaceous happening on a Wednesday or whatever, or flint axes first being chipped on a Saturday, but I suppose these had to fall somewhere in the week.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:30 AM on February 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

> 13. Today you are working for free if you're on a fixed annual wage. That's a fact?

I'm on a fixed annual wage, my employer reduces my hourly wage by an infinitesimal amount over the whole year so that the total of my bi-weekly pay checks equals the leap year - 1 day.

Governments can really be tight-fisted.
posted by DBAPaul at 10:20 AM on February 29, 2016

Just know this: if you see someone wearing coordinated Blue and Yellow today, give them a smile or a friendly nod. Or buy them a drink. Or a car or whatever. They are a good person and you should do good things for them.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:36 PM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Leap Year? We haven't celebrated Leap Year 'round these parts since World War II. Happy St. Patrick's Day though
posted by oulipian at 2:03 PM on February 29, 2016

The super pedant celebrate the leap day on 24th February. Stay with me.

In Portuguese Leap Years are called Bisextile Years. I always assumed it was because they are 366-day years, so 2 sixes = bisextile. This year I decided to check, and it looks like it is nothing of the sorts: http://sundialsoc.org.uk/news/ante-diem-bis-sextum-kalend/

The Romans would count down to the 1st March, the beginning of their new---martial---year, and 24 Febrary was the sixth day before 1st March (counting 1st March as day 1). 24th February was chosen to last 48 hours in Leap Years. Eventually they gave up on long days and added an extra day, bis sextium, i.e., a second sixth day before 1st March.

I still don't understand what it is that leaps, but that will have to wait another four years.
posted by natalinha at 2:40 PM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

One full orbit takes more than 365 days but less than 366. That's not surprising — there's no reason for the two to be linked.

Well, in the veeeeeeeery long term, wouldn't you expect 1 day = 1 year (or some other resonance) from tidal lock?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:49 PM on February 29, 2016

On a salary, if you're paid the same every month, aren't you coming out ahead this month, even with the leap year? It's those 31-day months that are killing you.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:01 PM on February 29, 2016

Well, in the veeeeeeeery long term, wouldn't you expect 1 day = 1 year (or some other resonance) from tidal lock?

I think we'll have lost the moon by then, so no months to worry about. .
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:12 PM on February 29, 2016

The way my husband explained it, if you work for the federal government, they divide your salary by the number of work days in a leap year. So in non-leap years, your W-2 will not reflect what your salary should be. As far as months or whatever, my brain hurts too hard to try to think of pay in terms of that because a 14-day pay period almost never falls smoothly into a month.
posted by Night_owl at 4:38 PM on February 29, 2016

Maybe a leap degree in the temperature scale can save us from global warming.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:43 PM on February 29, 2016

Back in 2004 in the NY Daily News, somebody wrote in to the Voice of the People column complaining that Leap Day should be placed in April or May when at least the weather's nice.

Really makes ya think.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:18 AM on March 1, 2016