There’s a rhyme to check the days of the months that goes – or, at least, starts – “thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, except February – ” but from there I can never remember quite what it devolves into while attempting to explain leap years. Oh, well. Eleven out of 12 isn’t bad.

Although I suppose that with a leap year starting, it’s time I brushed up.

Leap days are – this with the greatest possible thought having gone into word choice here – funny. Actually, “a by-product of an extremely inefficient human construct based on faulty logic and the whims of ancient emperors” also seems suitable, but “funny” is less of a mouthful.

Technically, time itself is the human construction and the Gregorian calendar just a manifestation of it, but that’s also a mouthful. I should probably end this line of thought here before I spiral into waxing eloquent about the revolution of the planets and how time has no meaning and clocks don’t function in dreams and the human brain cannot grasp the concept of steady passing time.

The Gregorian calendar’s evolution to where it is today is rather interesting, anyway. October, for example, derives from the same octoeight root as octopus and octahedron because it used to be the eighth month of the year. Way back in the decline of the BC era, though, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar added a couple of months, and later his adopted son Augustus renamed them after himself and Julius. So today we have July and August and a string of four months now inaccurately numbered.

I make a note to say “Gregorian calendar” because there are so many other calendars that could be and are used. There’s the Holocene calendar, which adds 10,000 years to start from the beginning of the Neolithic era, which its proponents reckon as a more significant epoch; the Buddhist, Burmese and Byzantine calendars, to pull three from a list; and, of course, the religious calendars of Islam and Judaism.

There’s also the Julian calendar, which is 13 days off from the Gregorian at the moment. That’ll change by Feb. 28 … in the year 2100. Which, incidentally, will not be a leap year, since the only centuries with leap years are the ones also divisible by 400. Thanks, Gregorian calendar.

The above lovely little idiosyncrasy is actually rather helpful, since it means that we only lose a day every 3,226 years instead of 128. Yay, numbers. So the upcoming leap year, just like the past 28, will be right on schedule. While I’m on the subject … Happy New Year, and best of luck with it to all of you out there.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.

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