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Morning Open Thread Thursday January 30, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-30
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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This diary is about February: why that name, and how to pronounce it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>Why is it called February?
The original Roman calendar only had 10 months, because, curiously, the Romans didn’t demarcate winter.
In the 700s BCE, the second king of Rome, Numa Pontilius, changed that, adding January and February to the end of the calendar, in order to conform to how long it actually takes Earth to go around the sun. The two new months were both originally 28 days long. It is lost to history why January acquired more days, though there are various unverifiable hypotheses.
At that time, March 1 became New Year’s Day, but later, in 153 BCE, the beginning of the year was moved to January 1.
Since other months, like January, are named after Roman gods, you’d be forgiven for thinking February was named after the Roman god Februus. But, the word February comes from the Roman festival of purification called Februa, during which people were ritually washed. In this case, the god was named after the festival, not the other way around.
>>>>>>>>>How to pronounce February
In the United States, the most common pronunciation is FEB-yoo-air-ee. Both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries consider the common pronunciation correct, along with the less common, more traditional standard FEB-roo-air-ee.
This gets fans of the traditional standard all worked up. But the loss of the first r in February is not some recent habit propagated by lazy teenagers. People have been avoiding that r for at least the last 150 years, and probably longer than that. Given certain conditions having to do with word stress and the other sounds in a word, we simply do not like to have two r's so close to each other. The name for the linguistic process where one sound drops out because another of the same sound is too close to it is dissimilation’.
Consider your pronunciation of the following words, and whether you really say the r's in parentheses:
su(r)prise, gove(r)nor, pa(r)ticular, be(r)serk, paraphe(r)nalia, cate(r)pillar, southe(r)ner, entrep(r)eneur, p(r)erogative, interp(r)etation.
Not everybody drops these r's, but at the same time, nobody seems to get too upset when they hear others do it.
link on name: February name
link on pronouncing it: Pronounce February
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