Look Before You Leap

Thirty days has September,

April, June and November,

All the rest have thirty-one,

Except February,

Which has but four and twenty-four,

Till leap year gives it one day more.

The strange phenomenon of leap day is fun for children that recite this rhyme to learn the names and number of days of the months. In fact, I still recite this poem in my head to figure out how many days each month has. For adults it means a Google doodle, and an extra day to get out the end of month reports. For those few, called leaplings, who were born on this special day (the chances of having a birthday on a leap day are about one in 1,461), it presents a unique mathematical anomaly, wherein a sixteen-year-old can say they are celebrating their fourth birthday.

Let's look at the numbers. If asked, most people would say a year equals 365 days. But they would be wrong. It actually takes the Earth 365.242 days to orbit the sun. To compensate, leap years are 366 days long. But even that was not enough to completely reconcile the calendar. Adding in an extra day every four years over corrected, so it was decided that only centuries divisible by 400 would be leap years (thus the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years).

Julius Caesar introduced the concept to the Roman calendar in 46 B.C., and the institution was adopted to the Gregorian calendar (our current standard) by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

Although it has no furry Pennsylvania rodents, ripe jolly old elves, or round orange squashes to signify it, leap day does have one quaint custom associated with it. Bachelors Day, believed to have originated in Ireland, was the one day of the year when it was acceptable for a woman to propose to a man. Upon refusal, if such were the case, the man was obligated to buy the woman twelve pairs of gloves, one for each month, to hide the shame of having no ring on her finger.

A modern take on this tradition is enacted in the town of Aurora, Illinois, where single women are deputized, and may arrest single men, subject to a four-dollar fine, on February 29th.

But I was doing some arithmetic in my own head, and it occurred to me leap day actually robs you of a day of life. Say for example, that if, God forbid, you should die today, the date of your death would be recorded as February 29th. If it were not leap year, the date of your death would be recorded as March 1st, clearly depriving you of an extra day of life.

But don't worry, you get an hour of that back when we switch to Daylight Saving Time.