April 2010

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Easter Egg-stravaganza

Easter is a festival of great significance for Christians, commemorating as it does the resurrection of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. There are a host of Easter customs, traditions, and expressions with interesting origins. Shrove Tuesday (also known as 'Pancake Day') is so named because it was the last day of Shrovetide – the days on which confessions were made. Shrove is from the English verb shrive 'to confess and atone for one's sins'. The consumption of pancakes on this day is due to their luxury ingredients sugar, eggs, and milk – a final feast before such treats are given up for Lent. In many languages, this day is known as 'Fat Tuesday', e.g. French Mardi Gras, as it is the last day of feasting before the fast. The following day 'Ash Wednesday' is named after the ashes which some Christian denominations apply to their foreheads in the sign of the cross to signify repentance at the start of the fast. Lent is a 40-day period of fasting from Ash Wednesday until Easter Saturday, observed by Christians in honour of the time Jesus spent renouncing the devil in the wilderness. Its name is derived from Old English lencten 'spring', literally the lengthening of hours of daylight.

This is the time of year when the clocks go forward in most of the northern hemisphere, stemming from an odd collective desire to manipulate time and give workers a longer evening. Daylight Saving Time (in Britain 'British Summer Time') is thought to reduce the number of road accidents in the evening. It can disadvantage farmers, however, whose work depends on early morning daylight. DST always results in much confusion and head-scratching over whether we gain or lose an hour, and whether this means there will be more or less light at the beginning or end of the day. There is much comic potential in getting it the wrong way round, and a ready-made excuse if you happen to oversleep that day. The American English mnemonic 'Spring forward, fall back' helps us remember which way to reset the umpteen clocks in our houses, and fortunately our clever computer clocks keep us right anyway.

Easter can be described as a 'moveable feast' as its date is not fixed to the calendar, but to a complicated calculation going back to the middle ages: Easter day is always the first Sunday after the fourteenth day of the lunar month that falls on or after the day of the vernal equinox. The expression 'moveable feast' was the title of Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his bohemian days in Paris in the 1920s, and can now be applied to any enjoyable time, particularly one which is unfixed in duration or date. It has a very broad remit, almost applying to anything flexible and beneficial, as these corpus lines show:

Gold is a moveable feast. You can sell it for a price – set twice a day – anywhere in the world.

The nature of family has been something of a moveable feast throughout history: it has always been impressively flexible.

Don't keep to set times – your baby may be tired in the evening. Make bathtime a moveable feast.

'Moveable feast' seems a literally apt expression to describe Easter in modern times: workers making the Great Easter Getaway to join loved ones and eat Easter eggs together. Happy Easter from Collins!

Anne Robertson - Editor

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March 2010

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(Tell Me Why) Ides Don't Like Mondays

Apart from "Et tu, Brute?", "Beware the Ides of March" is the most famous catch-phrase bequeathed to us by Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The Ides of March is the Ancient Roman name for 15 March, and the date had no intrinsically gloomy associations until Shakespeare immortalized it in 1599. Since then, beware the Ides of March has become a common way to indicate that some great misfortune, some tragic fall from grace, is about to occur (though it is less common now than it once was). In the US, the phrase was used facetiously to complain about taxes, back when Tax Day was 15 March (from 1918 until 1955 – ask your grandparents). Now Americans have to say "April is the cruellest month", quoting a more modern, though no less respected poet.

But why is the 15th called Ides of March in the first place? Well, in Roman times, they didn't number the days of the month, at least not the way we do. Instead, they had three special named days. The Kalends were the first day of the month (yes, it was plural). The Nones were usually the fifth day of the month (four months had the Nones on the seventh). Because the most famous Ides are those of March, many internet sources will tell you the Ides are the 15th day of a month. In fact, they were usually the 13th day, but four months (including March, of course) had their Ides two days later. Back when grammar school children were made to learn Latin, there was even a mnemonic rhyme to help them remember this:

In March, July, October, May
The Ides are on the fifteenth day

Sometimes the rhyme goes

In March, July, October, May
The Nones are on the seventh day

Both versions amount to the same hint, as whenever the Nones are the seventh, the Ides are the 15th.

To identify a day, the Romans counted how many days it was before the next named day. So 8 April was ante diem sextum Idus Apriles or "the sixth day before the Ides of April; 5 May was ante diem tertium nonas Maias or "the third day before the Nones of May", and 26 September was actually ante diem sextum kalendas Octobres or "the sixth day before the Kalends of October". No one can say the Romans weren't forward-thinking.

March, named after Mars, the god of War, was once the first month of the Roman year. The Ides of March was the day when one of the two Consuls began his term of office; the other began his on the Kalends of May. (The pronoun "his" in the preceding sentence is not meant to be sexist, by the way; it is simply a historical fact that all Roman Consuls were men.) If not for Caesar's death, the Ides not only of March, but of every month, would by now have fallen into obscurity. Caesar's famous assassination and Shakespeare's famous line have ensured they will live on in infamy, much like the anniversaries of other great disasters. This year, the Ides of March fall on a Monday, which is reason enough to fear them.

As for Shakespeare's other line, some contemporary sources claim Caesar's last were actually Greek: kai su teknon? ("And you, my son?"), showing off his education to the last (knowing Greek in Roman times was a bit like knowing Latin today). However, it's far more likely Caesar's dying word was "Aaaaah!"

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