Sorry. If you were born on Feb. 29, (which this year lands on Monday), you’re not really a quarter of your actual age, like you’ve been telling your enemies and friends. Statute says most of the time that your legal birthday is March 1, so there’s no getting out from under it. However, you do own the rights to one interesting designation – popular culture calls you a leapling, kind of an endearing little kiss on the cheek to those born on a day with nothing else to show for itself.
Yeah, compared with everything else, your leap day is about as inspiring as a clearance on Kaopectate – but many centuries ago, you’d have thought it ruled the skies. It took no less than Roman strongman Julius Caesar to set the ancient Roman calendar to rights, as his astronomers and officials had seriously screwed up in their observations of the solar year. By the time he became top man, the calendar allowed for only 355 days – 10 and a quarter days behind its solar counterpart.
Stay with me here.
In 46 B.C., Caesar figured he’d add one day (called the intercalary) every four years to make up for the slop between the earth’s and sun’s calendars – but the tradition didn’t take hold until after a 90-day transition to help align both. The following year, Caesar installed his intercalary six days before March 1, or what was Feb. 25 at that time.
Problem solved? Not quite. Turns out that the pesky solar year is about 11 minutes shy of 365 ¼ days – and the world’s star-gazers didn’t cop the clue until all the way into the 16th century, when the calendar was messed up again (this time by about 10 days). Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who in 1582 made the revisions we know today. However unwittingly, Greg did his legacy a favor by drawing up his new day tracker. The Gregorian calendar is the most widely used civil calendar in the world.
So there you have it, nutshell as it may be. We could have spent some time on the nuts and bolts of it all, reminding you that the solar year is 365.2425 days long (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds) in an effort to put it into clinical perspective. Come to think of it, we also might have teased your socks by adding that the galactic year (250,000 solar years, the time it takes the sun to orbit the Milky Way) comes complete with its own interminable sequence of leap centuries and millennia. But let’s not press our luck. Let’s let the day pass without interruption as usual, except for you persnickety leaplings, who have no other claim to viability save your little 24-hour corner. It took us centuries to carve out the day you so blithely call your own – before that galactic year sneaks up and ruins everything, you better enjoy it while it lasts.
