CALENDARIOS

In Spanish 101, for the chapter on days of the week, months of the year, seasons, I bring in a calendario in Spanish. I point out that the week begins on the far left on lunes (Monday). I offer a few points of extra credit to anyone who can research and tell us why the weeks on our US calendars begin on Sunday. (I can't do this anymore because they all pull out their iPhones/Blackberries and chaos ensues. Some of them are desperate for extra credit since they've already sensed that they will be unable to conjugate verbs). The question of what day the week begins has never been answered to my satisfaction. They usually say it's in the Bible; I say show me, and that's the end of that. I was mentioning the topic of this post to señor Jubilado and. . . . .

I, iPhoneless but iMacable, Googled a bit and found out that there is indeed an International Standardization organization that decrees such things as weight and measures (metric system, anyone?) and calendar organization. Monday is the first day of the week, according to it, and most European countries' calendars thus have Saturday and Sunday at the right-hand end of the 7-day week, forming (of course) the weekend. Calendars that split the weekend--Saturday right, Sunday left--as is the case in the U.S.--are sometimes seen in Europe, and are thought to be an artifact of an earlier and less secular era that, in thrall to a reading of the Christian Bible that accepted the Jewish designation of Saturday as the Sabbath, made it the day of rest and thus the last day of the week. I'm sure there are other explanations, just as there are certainly as many different ways of counting days/weeks/years as there are religious/cultural justifications for doing so. In the end, though, it seems that the students who claimed the the calendar has something to do with the Bible are not off the mark. Perhaps they deserved that elusive extra credit that the professor so cruelly denied them. As for conjugating verbs, why wouldn't that concept have been taught in elementary school? But that's another subject, so to speak, entirely.

But, wait! retorts profesora Jubilado. When did all this calendar stuff start? Who made the decision to begin the week with Sunday in the US? Señor Jubilado, a historian, should have included this information in his report. No extra credit for him.

What? No extra credit? (Not that such a thing even exists.) cf: Pope Gregory; his calendar; the acceptance of it by European ("Christian") countries over a several-century period; England's adoption of it (1722, I think) and consequent adoption in the American colonies; the subsequent standardization of time zone, weights and measures, and calendar organization--and eventually currency--in most of Europe (positivism, anyone?); the reluctance/refusal of certain areas of Europe (Great Britain, most obviously) to adopt any or all of these changes; the reluctance/refusal of the U.S. to change its weights and measures (in popular, not scientific, usage) and calendar to conform to the government-imposed system employed by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys and denizens of Old Europe who blithely discard the methods that have been used since time immemorial to tell the peasants when they can take a day off. Don't tread on us. Meet me at the Lincoln Memorial. Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, AAARRGH!