It just occured to me that I am very confused about the fact that SEPTember is the 9th month of the year, and OCTOber is the 10th.  Doesn't SEPT in september suggest the 7th month and OCTO in october suggest the 8th month?

Am I missing something really obvious here?  Does someone have an easy answer?  Is it a coincidence, and really september and october just happen to look like seven and eight in some romance latin-like language?

Well, NOV is a prefix for 9 and DEC (decimal) for 10 as well.

[cliff clavin] It all goes back to ancient times when there were 10 months. People found that they didn't have enough time to plant crops, harvest, etc.

So they decided to make the year two months longer. They added April and May. These were the names of "Murry the Winemakers" daughters. They choose those names because Murry supplied the wine at the meeting.

Daylight savings time was for similar reasons.[/cliff clavin]

July and August have been added after the months were named. That's why September, October, November, December (7, 8, 9, 10) are "2 months off".
IIRC, this was called the Julian Calender Reform, after the guy who ordered it: Julius Caesar ("July"). Augustus was another Roman emperor.

THANK YOU!  That makes perfect sense. Now I can sleep tonight.  [:)]

So who elected this Julias Caesar guy and was he a left or right winger?[:)]

Up until the early 20th century, Emperial Russia, the early Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox church and I believe the Greek Orthodox church--maybe more--operated by the 10 month Gregorian calendar.

That's why the Soviets never celebrated the October Revolution in October.

There is another group that still uses the 10 month calendar, some kind of religious distinction. Oh well

Definetely a right-winger, but I won't tell you why ;)



Close. But no banana.
After aforementioned calender reform by Julius Caesar, everything was fine for a coupla thousand years. Even leap years have already been invented, to make up for the fact that an actual astronomical year has 365 1/4 days...so every 4 years, you add a day to get the calender back in sync with reality.
This worked for awhile, until it was noticed that 365.25 days/year wasn't quite "it". So Pope Gregor modified the rules for leap years (one every 4 years, but not when the year is divisible by 200, unless the ommitted leap year would be a full millennium [1]). This was, who would have guessed it, called the Gregorian Calender Reform, and to get the calender back up to date (ha ha), 10 days or maybe 25 have been ommitted entirely when this reform went into effect. Now the Pope being Catholic, the Russian Orthodox Church decided "fuck'em, it's a NWO conspiracy, we won't play!" and stuck to the Julian Calender. So not only have the inaccuracies not been corrected, they accumulated further and it was a mess to behold :)

Edited to add a footnote:

[1] Sounds complicated and confusing? Damn right it does. That's why early programmers decided not that include all those rules in computer clocks and simplified the matters somewhat to safe memory. Not the simple "Is '00 2000 or 1900 or what?" was the Y2K bug, but this tricky leap year thingy.

Since a year is still 365 days long, there would have to be more days per month. There'd be at least 5 weeks per month.

Now that I think of it, it'd be nice to have a couple of extra days to pay the bills.... An extra weekend in the months too. High monthly incomes...25% looks good on paper.

O'course quartely reports would be due every 2 1/2 months and if you get paid on the 1st and the 15th now, when would you get paid on Gregorian calendar? The 1st and ????