debunkers are us

[calimac]

Here's a crisp debunking of the notion that "Black Friday" originally had anything to do with "going into the black" financially. Instead, it's an old Philadelphia term referring to the hellish day, dreaded by retail workers and cops alike, when crowds swarmed the stores in between Thanksgiving and the Saturday Army-Navy football game.

Excellent. Now that we're done with that one, can we disabuse ourselves of the equally ridiculous notions that "Blue Moon" means "second full moon in a calendar month" or that centuries can only begin in years ending in "01"?

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The last strikes me as turning on an equivocation. A century is 100 years, and any 100 years can be a century; for example, 1815-1915 makes a plausible historical unit of 100 years, more so than 1801-1901. But "the twentieth century" means "the twentieth hundred-year interval in a series of hundred-year intervals with neither gaps nor overlaps that make up the Common Era." And the first day of the Common Era was January 1, 1 C.E. The day before that was December 31, 1 B.C.E.

It's a convention, but it's a convention that makes numerical sense; it doesn't require introducing a fictitious Year Zero, or having a ninety-nine year "century," or skipping over some number of years somewhere along the way. So it's a convention I find reasonable.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia (i know, what a fine authority...) "blue moon" refers to "the third full moon in a season with four full moons." This is apparently the definition used by the Farmer's Almanac. The "second in a month" interpretation apparently comes from an article in Sky & Telescope, in March of 1946.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Fiscal centuries?