Keeping in step.
As is my custom, I search through various sources for an interesting event that
took place on the chosen dates for uploading these columns. That being the case, it shouldn't come as a surprise that on the Wikipedia page
for February 28 the rather laconic line
1700 - Today is followed by March 1 in Sweden, thus creating the Swedish calendar.
caught my eye. Why, I wondered to myself, would March 1 following February 28
bring about the creation of "the Swedish calendar". And of course an
additional question also begged to be asked - just what was this "Swedish
calendar".
It perhaps took me longer than necessary to realize that in the year 1700, February
28 should "naturally" have been followed by February 29. And that suggested
that about 300 years ago the Swedes were in the process of calibrating their calendar
to something that more precisely matched the path of the earth around the sun.
But should 1700 really have been a leap year? The Gregorian calendar performs
some fine tuning by adding a leap-day to century years only if they're divisible
by 400. So in 1700, February 28 should have been followed by March 1. I won't
iron out all the details (frankly I don't know all of them, though at least some
of the story of how Europe slowly adopted a common calendar can be found here
and here)
but it makes for some enjoyable reading.
And if the topic of tagging relates to the idea of the wisdom of crowds, we might
perhaps note that an article by Robert Poole from a 1995 issue of Past and Present
titled "Give Us Our Eleven Days!": Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century
England (at least the beginning of this 40 page paper is available here)
opens with the sentence
For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752.
I find the history of calendars fascinating, and the crowds tie-in has
a serendipitous ring to it. Still, another tie-in may be just as elegant. It was
on this day, in 1939, that the word dord (actually a non-word) that had
mistakenly crept its way into Webster's Third International Dictionary five years
earlier, was discovered (and, shall we say, outed?). The story itself is one of
a simple misreading (though
it's well worth a read) but it perhaps raises the question of whether, had
some cross-tagging been used, it might have been found even earlier.
Go to: But you can, you can!