Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and I'm a TESOL certified English teacher.
I teach English to students who are learning it as a second language.
On today's episode I want to discuss leap year.
It is 2024 and it is the month of February, which means that we have an extra day added to this month.
This month will end on February 29th instead of February 28th.
On today's episode, I want to discuss the history of leap years, why we have them and what some superstitions are regarding leap day.
Now leap years are a little bit strange.
They occur almost every four years.
There are some rules that determine when they don't occur every four years that we will talk about.
And the reason that we have them is because our calendar year is slightly out of sync with the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
Now we say that the Earth travels around the Sun once every 365 days, but that's not entirely true.
Instead, the path of the Earth is slightly longer than 365 days, about 365 .25 days, which means we're about a quarter of a day short, about six hours short every year.
Now, if you take a period of time about four years and you add in an extra day, you actually re -sync the calendar that we are using with the actual path of the Earth around the Sun.
This is the concept of leap years.
However, leap years that we know them right now didn't always exist.
The concept of having these additional days add into a calendar to try to get it to match up closer with Earth's orbit around the Sun first was proposed by the ancient Egyptians.
The Egyptians added extra months because they realized that their calendars are getting out of sync with the orbit and with the solar calendar.
And they just kind of added months haphazardly.
There wasn't any real pattern to them, as we would say.
So haphazard means just by chance, just wherever.
No real structure, no real order because of that wasn't really the perfect system.
If you fast forward to the Roman times, the Roman calendar was about 305 days.
And again, they had to add extra days in to try to get it to more closely match the actual orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
Now, of course, they didn't have the correct formula either.
They did add some extra months, but it ended up being 355 days in their calendar, which again was short of the actual solar calendar of what they were actually seen in terms of where the Sun and the stars were at during a given year.
Now, in 45 B .C., Julius Caesar, who was known for so many things, one of which was unveiling his calendar.
He added days to the month of February and that became the tradition, having this extra added days every four years in the month of February.
And that would help regulate and sync up the calendar better.
Now, however, even though this calendar was really close to the actual solar orbit of the Earth around the Sun, again, it was slightly off.
It was off by about 11 minutes every four years.
You think 11 minutes isn't a lot of time.
Eleven minutes doesn't seem like so much.
But if you add up those 11 minutes over decades and centuries, it eventually becomes a lot of time.
Therefore, even though Julius Caesar's calendar was better, even though he did implement the system of a leap year every four years, it wasn't exactly perfect.
And by the 16th century, the calendar was out of sync by about 10 days.
Because of that, Pope Gregory unveiled the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar that we currently use.
It still used the leap year system.
It's still used one leap day every four years, but it implemented a second rule about the entire concept of a leap year.
We are used to a leap year being every four years.
However, that's not always the case.
It is true that a leap year will be every four years during a century.
However, on the first year of a century, for example, the year 1700, 1800, 1900 or 2000, it may or may not be a leap year.
The rule about this is if the year is divisible by 100, but not divisible by 400, it will not be a leap year.
However, if the year is divisible by 100 and 400, it will be.
I know this is a little bit confusing, but let's look at some examples to try to see what this means.
For example, in the year 1700, 1800, and 1900, none of those years were leap years.
Even though the previous leap year had been four years previous, that particular year or those particular years, I should say, they were not leap years because 1700, 1800, 1900 can all be divided by 100, but they cannot be divided evenly by 400.
However, the year 2000 was a leap year because it could be divided by 100 and 400.
Therefore, 2000 was a leap year, but 1900, 1800, and 1700 were not.
That also means that the coming new century, the year 2100, will not be a leap year, and there will be a period of time where we don't have a leap year for eight years.
The reason that February was selected as the month that gets the extra day every four years goes back to Roman times.
February, or what was called February in the Latin language, which I'm not even going to try to pronounce, was actually the last month of the Roman calendar and was considered a month of transition and renewal.
It was also the shortest month of the year, which it is currently in the Gregorian calendar as well, and therefore it's the best place to have the leap day added for a leap year.
There are some traditional folklore and superstitious beliefs around leap year and leap day.
For example, traditionally, it was thought that leap year brought bad weather.
There was a saying that leap year was never a good sheep year.
What this meant was that leap years brought bad weather and were bad for farmers in terms of agriculture and their flock or their sheep.
Another superstitious belief was that getting married on leap day was bad luck.
This was a Greek superstition that you would have bad luck if you were married on leap year.
However, in Irish traditions, there was a tradition of women proposing to men on leap day.
This would be a reversal of the traditional gender roles where men would propose to women.
On this day, once every four years, women could propose to men.
The idea was that men were supposed to accept it, and if they didn't, they were supposed to give some type of gift, some type of compensation or payment to the woman if they actually denied their proposal.
There is a movie about this that stars Amy Adams.
It is called Leap Year, and it is from 2010.
If you want to watch that, it is a romantic comedy.
I will say it wasn't very well received.
It doesn't have very good critical scores.
It's not considered to be a very great film, but if you want to watch something kind of fun and easy watches, we would say you don't really have to be too invested in it or pay super close attention.
It's just something you could have on and kind of enjoy.
It's a romantic comedy of the character of Amy Adams.
She is going to Ireland to go propose to her boyfriend because he is not proposed to her and it is a leap year.
It is going to be leap day, and she wants to propose to him.
Of course, she finds out about true love along the way and meets her true love, but I won't spoil the rest of the plot in case you want to watch it.
The last superstition is about birthdays, and it is the luck associated with being born on a leap day in Scotland.
It was considered good luck to be born on February 29.
People who were born on this day are called leap babies.
They only have a true birthday.
They're only able to celebrate on the actual date of their birth.
Once every four years, the other three years, they have to celebrate on either February 28 or March 1.
That makes the birthday every four years maybe a little bit special, a little bit different from their normal birthday celebrations.
If you are familiar with the show Modern Family, you might have actually seen this concept play out in one of the episodes.
If you haven't seen it, Modern Family is an American sitcom.
It is a comedy about an extended family, a father, his children, and then their children.
In the show, one of the characters named Cam is a leap baby.
He was born on February 29, and during one of the episodes, he gets to celebrate his birthday and he's very excited to do so.
It's a little bit funny because his husband makes a comment about how he's an eight -year -old because he only has had eight leap years in his lifetime.
A stranger walks by and looks at them a little bit funny, a little bit weird, because it sounds like he's calling his husband an eight -year -old.
It's just played for comedic effect.
It's just supposed to be a joke.
But it shows a little bit about the traditions of celebrating your birthday.
When you are a leap baby, how you celebrate your birthday and how special it is during the leap year when you can actually celebrate on the true day.
I hope you learned a little bit about leap years, why they are necessary to synchronize our calendars with the Earth's orbit around the sun, and what some traditional beliefs are about leap years and leap days.
If you have a traditional belief or some type of folklore superstition, please leave it in the comment section below.
I would love to learn about those.
Reminder that there is a vocabulary list in the description of this episode and of our previous episodes.
You can find the words and phrases that I use along with their definitions so you can begin to use them in conversation.
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