PICKENS COUNTY — It just doesn’t make any sense. A septangle is a figure with seven sides. A septave is a seven-tone musical scale. A septuagenarian is a person who is between 70 and 79 years old — so why in the world is September the ninth month?
Well, blame the Romans.
September, which stems from the Latin root “septem,” meaning seven, actually was the seventh of the calendar originally.
See, the Roman calendar was 10 months long and it consisted of 304 days. Months included Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December.
The last six months were assigned names according to their ordinal numbers — Quintilis is the fifth month, Sextilis is the sixth month, and so on. (Think “Oct” for eight, “Dec” for 10, etc.)
Then, in 45 BCE, Julius Caesar introduced the “Julian calendar” — subtle, huh? Anyway, in the Julian calendar, the year grew to include two more months — January and February — named for the Roman gods Janus and Februus.
The months Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed to July and August in honor of Julius and Augustus Caesar. In fact, had the Roman senate had gotten their way, we might now be calling September “Tiberius” or “Antoninus,” after two Roman Emperors. Or we might have ended up calling September “Germanicus,” as Emperor Domitian wanted.
Either way, although there were repeated attempts to change the names for September, October, November and December — none stuck and the strangeness of calling the ninth month “Seventh Month” didn’t seem to bother Old English speakers.
September came into Old English from Old French, replacing the Old English forms, Hāligmōnað and Hærfestmōnað, which means roughly “harvest month” in modern English.
(And sorry guys, I can type “Hærfestmōnað” but I don’t know how to pronounce it.)
Later, the Julian calendar was reformed again, this time to the Gregorian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII. Gregory’s change reduced the number of leap years every four centuries — but that’s a different story for a different day.
