While enjoying a steaming bowl of rice and vegetables for breakfast last week, I had an epiphany. Just because it’s summer vacation doesn’t mean learning has to stop for students, teachers, parents, or any other pulse-maintainers who plan on remaining extant for the foreseeable future.
For educators like me, a two-month respite from rising before dawn, daily lesson planning, assessing student work, and trying to look stern while on cafeteria duty provides an ideal opportunity to explore intriguing subjects I’m genuinely curious about.
For example, I’ve always wanted to know how July and August originated. They obviously weren’t part of the original Roman calendar, because anyone moderately familiar with Latin knows the prefix “Sept” signifies seventh, just like “Oct” means eighth, “Nov” indicates ninth, and “Dec” tenth. So how come, I wondered, aren’t September, October, November and December the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year, but rather the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, respectively.
Oops! It turns out July and August were there all along, albeit under different names. The Roman calendar originally consisted of ten months. However, in 713 BC, Rome’s king decided to add January (named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings) and February (in honor of an ancient Roman purification festival) to replace the previously nameless 61-day winter gap. February fell at the end of the year until 153 BC, when Roman officials moved the two newest months to the front of the annual line in order to coincide with the start of a consular official’s term. That’s why the last four months of the calendar year seem misnumbered. July was originally called Quintilis, since it was the fifth month. That changed in 44 BC, when the month was renamed to honor the just-assassinated Julius Caesar, whose birthday was during Quintilis. Thirty-six years later the Roman Senate renamed Sextilis (originally the 6th month, but by then the 8th) August as a salute to Augustus, Rome’s first emperor.
Another random thought I had while lunching on some savory mushroom rice pilaf: why doesn’t anyone get named Julius anymore? The aforementioned Julius Caesar was obviously a man of distinction, as was basketball superstar Julius Erving and US Open-winning golfer Julius Boros. Julius isn’t a societally taboo name like Adolf or Osama. But two renowned Juliuses, Groucho Marx and J. Robert Oppenheimer, apparently preferred keeping their given first name closeted, so perhaps there’s a stigma to Julius I’m unaware of.
Another thing I wondered about while dining on garlic rice one evening last week: what’s the word for a 250th celebration? Everyone knows a centennial is a 100th anniversary and a bicentennial is the 200th, but what’s this year’s 250th birthday of our nation’s founding called?
There are, I learned, several acceptable one-word terms for “250th,” including semiquincentennial, sesquicentennial, and sestercentennial. I prefer the last of these options, since it’s the only one I can pronounce with any degree of confidence.
Later, while snacking on salted salmon rice balls I discovered the global food conglomerate which owns Uncle Ben’s Rice changed the product’s name to “Ben’s Original” six years ago. My curiosity piqued when I saw the “Best Before” date on the bottom of the elderly box of Uncle Ben’s I was about to prepare read, “March, 2023.” Thankfully it turns out if one carefully follows the directions, rice that’s three-plus years past its “Best Before” date comes out just as perfectly as the more-recently-boxed kind does.
I also learned one other practical lesson last week. Cooking the entire contents of a one-pound box of Uncle Ben’s yields a whole lot of rice.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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