Why am I having a hard time finding the word “callipygian” in the dictionary? No one I ask seems to know what it means. –Kurt Jacobsen, U.S.A.
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Is there a phenomenon known as February the 30th? When I was in fourth grade my somewhat eccentric teacher explained that in some years there could be as many as 367 days per annum! Everyone knows there are 365 1/4 days in a year, requiring an extra day every four years to keep the calendar in sync with the cosmos. My teacher claimed there were something like an extra six minutes after that quarter day which are being slowly counted up by the timekeepers in Greenwich until they get enough to make another day, which is to be tacked on at the end of February. Theoretically, if this alleged extra day occurred in a leap year, there would be two extra days in February, thus creating February 30th. Was my teacher playing a cruel joke on innocent children, or did she speak the truth? I shudder to think of those poor kids born on the 30th who’d only have one official birthday in their lives! –S. Dodds, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Forget Oedipus and all that Freudian jive–the real source of the world’s neuroses is the incredible swamp of misinformation peddled by elementary school teachers. I recall spending my grade school years in chronic terror over my posture, having been told that slouching in your seat caused curvature of the spine. Your February 30 yarn is equally absurd. It’s true there aren’t exactly 365 1/4 days in a year. But the real figure isn’t six minutes more, it’s 11 minutes and 14 seconds less. To compensate we don’t add an extra leap day, we skip one every so often–on average, once every 128 years.
How come you always see just one shoe by the side of the road? –Anonymous, Saint Paul, Minnesota
