ONE OF the convenient fictions we live by holds that there are exactly 365 days in a year. In point of fact, the earth turns roughly 365 and a quarter times on its axis by the time it has completed a full year’s orbit around the sun, which means that periodically the calendar has to catch up, thus the convention of leap years. A leap year contains one extra day, February 29, for a total of 366 days. 2012 is a leap year.

So, where does the “leap” come in? This is a perennial source of confusion. In a normal sequence of years, a calendar date that falls on, say, a Monday one year will fall on Tuesday the next, Wednesday the year after that, Thursday the year after that, and so on. But every fourth year, thanks to the extra day in February, we “leap” over the expected day of the week — Friday, in this case — and that same calendar date lands on Saturday instead.

Even more abstruse is the arithmetical formula used to calculate which years are leap years, here described as succinctly as one could ever hope by Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, author of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:


Why such complexity? Because the exact number of days in a solar year is actually ever-so-slightly less than 365.25 (it is 365.242374, to be precise), so the algorithm had to be designed such that every now and then a leap year is skipped to keep the calendar on track over the long haul.

Leap year / leap day folklore

Persons born on leap day, February 29, are called “leaplings” or “leapers.” However fun it may be to rib them for enjoying 75 percent fewer birthdays than the rest of us over the course of their lives, they do have the special privilege, between leap years, of celebrating their nativity a full day earlier if they so choose. It was once thought that leapling babies would inevitably prove sickly and “hard to raise,” though no one remembers why.

Ironically, notwithstanding the fact that the whole point of adding an extra day to February every four years was to align the human measurement of time more closely with nature, in days gone by folks apparently believed that monkeying with the calendar like that might actually throw nature out of whack, even hampering the raising of crops and livestock. It used to be said, for example, that beans and peas planted during a leap year “grow the wrong way” — whatever that means — and, in the words of the Scots, “Leap year was never a good sheep year.”

The tradition of “ladies’ privilege”




Mind you, this passage was already considered suspect by some of the same Victorian authors who quoted it — not only because the text couldn’t be sourced (“the only authority for this statement is the ‘Illustrated Almanac’ for 1853,” wrote one critic, “which probably manufactured the statute as a jest”) but also because its “old English” phraseology rings too modern for the year 1288. In addition, the text itself proved to be quite variable — in regards to grammar, spelling, and even content, with some versions boasting an extra clause specifying that the law pertained to “ilk yeare knowne as lepe yeare.”

Another tall tale — there’s no reason to believe it’s anything but — dates the origin of ladies’ privilege to the 5th century, around the time St. Patrick supposedly drove the snakes out of Ireland (speaking of tall tales). As the story goes, St. Patrick was approached by St. Bridget, who had come to protest on behalf of all women the unfairness of always have to wait for men to propose marriage. After due consideration, St. Patrick offered St. Bridget and her gender the special privilege of being able to pop the question one year out of every seven. Some haggling ensued, and the frequency ultimately settled upon was one year out of four — leap years, specifically — an outcome which satisfied both parties. Then, unexpectedly, it being a leap year and St. Bridget being single, she got down on one knee and proposed to St. Patrick on the spot. He refused, of course, bestowing on her a kiss and a beautiful silk gown in consolation.


Earliest English-language sources





It is again alluded to in this couplet from an Elizabethan-era stage play called The Maid’s Metamorphosis, first performed in 1600 (a leap year):

Master be contented, this is leape yeare,
Women weare breetches, petticoats are deare.

Finally, we would be able to push back the earliest documented reference to the “ladies’ privilege” another 200 years if only we could authenticate this couplet attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) by Vincent Lean in his Collectanea, published in 1905:

In Leap Year they have power to chuse
The men no charter to refuse

Unfortunately, the only other source I’ve found it in is The English Year by Steve Roud, who notes that the attribution has so far proved “impossible to verify.”

By David Emery, Guide