Years, Months, Days

This is intended as an exercise in “stream of consciousness”. It isn’t thought out. Don’t take it seriously!

One of the things which interests me is how the language and symbols we use can affect the way we think. This is sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though really that is a misnomer).

At this time of the year we quite often use language which refers to the “beginning” and “end of” the year. There is a lot of “looking back” and “looking forward”. References to the Roman god “Janus”, who was the god of doorways among other things, are appropriate.

The thing is, a circle has no beginning and no end (and I know that the Earth’s orbit round the Sun is not circular, rather it is elliptical). Any beginning or end we choose is arbitrary. Western European convention just happens to have chosen a date which is close to the Winter Solstice, and we happen to have given a particular importance to years.

There are calendar systems which are more lunar than solar. They emphasise the months rather than the years, and as we all know months do not fit neatly into years.

Worse than that, days do not fit properly into either months or years. That is what the leap-years (and leap other things too) are all about. The underlying problem is that days, months and years are actually independent of one another, but humans like to join them together, and if at all possible we like to do the joining in a regular way.

One of the products of the French Revolution was the so-called “Republican Calendar”. The Republican Calendar attempted to make the months days and years “line up” neatly. It also tried to force things to be decimal. The result was complicated, though it did give some rather poetic names to things. It didn’t catch on at all. In fact the only reference to it that I can think of in the modern world is the dish “Lobster Thermidor”.

 (1^st January 2017 – 317 words)