Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
I am pleased to announce the formation of the Committee for the Rectification of Mensual Nomenclature. It is a longstanding scandal that the names of our months are either absurd or mathematically mistaken, and it is time to set them to rights. I invite you to join me.
Our last four months, for example, are named after the numbers seven, eight, nine, and ten in Latin: septem, octo, novem, and decem, but they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months in our calendar! This is because the Romans, for some reason, decided to start the year earlier, in January rather than March, without renumbering the months. At the very least we should move these four names two months earlier and get rid of July and August, which were named after two emperors after they were declared gods. Then we could rename the last two months undecimber and duodecimber. This simple shift would prevent confusion among high-school students taking introductory Latin.
While we are doing that we might as well get rid of the ending –ber, the meaning of which nobody knows. We might substitute mensis, Latin for “month,” giving us duodecimmensis for our last month. That name might take a while to catch on, I admit, as it will no longer rhyme with “remember.”
The other current month names are a strange mixed bag, most of them pagan gods. January is named after the god Janus, who had two faces so he could look forward and backward at the same time; he was the god of gates and doorways, so it is logical enough, if you’re a Roman, that he should preside over the beginning of the year, after it was snatched from March.
February has no such justification. The Latin plural noun februa meant something like “means of purification or expiation,” which probably entailed burning something, so it may be related to febris, meaning “fever” (our word derives from it, via French). The Februa ceremonies were held right when we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a feverish day in a cold month. The Romans named no month after Cupid, but maybe we should. How about Lovemonth?
March is named after Mars, which seems unfair, since he also has a day of the week: French mardi, Italian martedi, and so on—Tuesday to us. But of course the Romans were always at war, and March usually opened the war season. Surely we can do better.
The meaning of the name April is pretty obscure. It might come from a root meaning “open,” as in the opening of flowers (and whence our word “aperture”), or from a compound meaning “following, next,” or (my favorite) from Etruscan Apru, the goddess of love, from the first half of Aphrodite. The Roman month was indeed dedicated to Venus, and there must be thousands of poems in many languages devoted to April and the amorous thoughts it rouses in young people. So maybe April should be called Lovemonth instead of February, which we could change to Keepwarmmonth.
May is not so clear either. Some say it is named after the Greek goddess Maia, one of the Pleiades and the mother of Hermes, but others trace it to a masculine name Maius, whoever he was, from Latin magnus “great.” We could call it Greatmonth, which it usually is in New Hampshire, though it’s not so great if you dislike black flies.
June is transparently named after Juno, the queen of the gods, and the wife of Jupiter, or Jove. She must have been nagging him for her own month, since he already had his own day, dies Iovis, or giovedi in Italian, our Thursday.
July and August, named after the two Caesars, Julius and Augustus, were inserted into the calendar rather late. July had been called Quintilis, the fifth (month), when the year began in March, but Julius was born in Quintilis so it got his name. August had been called Sextilis, the sixth (month), before Augustus took it over; it seems he wanted it to follow the previous emperor’s month without a gap; it was also the month when he conquered Egypt, that is, Antony and Cleopatra.
Do we want all these dubious gods and deified emperors sitting on our months? Do we even want Latin numbers, even if we re-order them? We could just number them all in English from the beginning, imitating the Japanese: ichigatsu = one-month, nigatsu = two-month, and so on. A little boring, I admit.
Then why don’t we revive the Old English names that were used for centuries before we adopted the Roman names? I’ll just list them here and translate them. Perhaps in a future column I’ll see if I can make sense of them.
January: Aefterra Geola, “Later Yule”
February: Solmonath, “Mud Month”; or Kalemonath, “Cabbage Month”
March: Hredmonath, “Hred’s Month,” whoever she was, apparently a goddess
April: Eastermonath, “Easter Month”; another goddess, the goddess of dawn
May: Thrimilcemonath, “Three Milking Month,” when the cows need extra attention
June: Aerra Lithe, “Earlier Mild Time”; or Seremonath, “Dry Month”
July: Aefterra Lithe, “Later Mild Time”
August: Weodmonath, “Weed Month”
September: Haligmonath, “Holy Month”; or Haerfestmonath, “Harvest Month”
October: Winterfylleth, perhaps “Winterfilling” (filling the barn for the winter?)
November: Blotmonath, “Blood Month” (slaughtering animals for the winter?)
December: Aerra Geola, “Earlier Yule”
We still have a couple of goddesses hanging around, but for starters we can surely make good use of Mudmonth and Weedmonth. We’ll discuss the others at the next meeting of the CRMN.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.