Frazz by Jef Mallett for February 17, 2017

Speaking of Julius (and later Augustus), what are the odds that 2 of our months would have names very similar to theirs, and in the proper order to boot? (Actually, about the same as the odds that the former 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months would each be displaced by 2 to become September, October, November, and December.)

There are a lot of words like that, based on numbers, people, etc you don’t necessarily pick up on until you happen to look them up, or just have a “Eureka” sort of moment.

A couple that just came to mind from my own childhood were realising that a “quarter” was actually a quarter of a dollar… who woulda thunk?….

and a little later, maybe 5th grade, that a “president” is someone who presides, which is why our founding fathers chose that word, rather than something that implies great power, which they wanted to avoid.

BTW… just to add to the calendar stuff …. for no particular reason except I think it’s interesting ….

In the fall of 1752, England, and thus the American colonies , switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar… they knocked 11 days out of the calendar to catch up.

They also decreed that Jan 1st would be New Year’s day, rather than the accepted March 25th.

That meant 1753 started almost three months early…. and before George Washington’s birthday, in February… so he (and a lot of other people born in those months) never got a birthday in in 1752.

But their birth dates were also moved up, so that their ages wouldn’t be changed by the switch. Instead of 1731, he was then officially born in 1732…. and turned 21 on Feb 22nd, 1753 instead of Feb 11th, 1752.

I read a story, probably apocryphal, that he was known to grumble about it.

WhiteHeron… if you haven’t been put to sleep by all that…

could you, pretty please, tell me what you meant yesterday by your joke about Beviek?

Am I missing something?

Except that “Julius” doesn’t rhyme with “clueless.” Caulfield shouldn’t be making fun of another student’s stupidity if he doesn’t even know what “rhyme” means.

I wonder what else octopi-s his thoughts?

Frazz appears to be reading Caulfield’s comment as a cheap shot. But, to give Caulfield perhaps more credit for subtlety than he is due, the odds of ‘Julius rhyming with clueless,’ are zero. Caulfield would know that, therefore, Caulfield is saying that Julius is not clueless.