February – It Almost Wasn’t a Month

Yup, we are going back to February, there was more you needed to know.

If you are looking for a few words on Valentine’s Day, there, you just got them.  I have decided to spare us all the pain and agony of reading another article about the love day, hard pass.  Instead let’s focus on February itself.  As you may or may not know, February is the second month of the year, it also has an “r” which makes no sense to me.  I mean it’s like Wednesday with its rogue “dn” messing with everything we know about English.

Now let’s get to the real meat and potatoes of the whole thing – where does the word February even come from?  Well, here it is: February was named after the Latin word februum, which means purification because the month was a time for purification – don’t ask me, I didn’t come up with this.

This is actually quite interesting because the Old English word for February is Solmonath.  Why is this interesting?  Well for starters Solmonath is spelled nothing like February and secondly it means “mud month” – quite the opposite of purification.  When you think about it, the old English folk weren’t just drinking O.E., they just called it like they saw it, a very muddy month.  This line now makes perfect sense, “Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down here!”

The old Roman calendar considered the winter season a month-less period – In their defense, they didn’t ski – and the year consisted of only 10 months.  Think about that for a moment, they had a calendar of 10 months, but just decided to skip right over winter.  That’s like a little kid covering their eyes and thinking you can’t see them.

Luckily, reality kicked in around 700 BCE and people finally got to have birthday parties.  This is because the months of February and January was added.  Even crazier is the fact that February didn’t become the second month of the year until around 450 BCE – it was originally the last month of the year.  Those darn Romans.

There was a lot of math and adding of filler-months, etc. to account for the 365-day (366 on leap year) calendar that we know and love today, but for now, you have as much knowledge of February as anyone should ever have.  Now go out and astound your friends and family at parties with these amazing facts.  Trust me, they will love you for it.  I, myself, am going to go enjoy a 40 of O.E. and ponder mud.  Long live the filth, Dennis!