It's Leap Day of Leap Year, and I have been trying to discover why it's called that. What is this Leap business about? What are we leaping over, into, or upon?
Ask.com says it's because we "jump ahead one day." That's lame. Actually, in order to do that, we'd have to take a day away from February so we could leap into March, but we are delaying the arrival of March, so that won't work.
Wikipedia doesn't consider the question of where the Leap comes from at all.
Dictionary.com, however, says it comes from the Middle Ages when the extra day caused the fixed (church) feast days to "leap" ahead one day in the week. Seriously?
I've had to come up with my own solution, which is: as we all know, the astronomical year is 365.25 days long, and if we didn't add one day to our shortest month every four years (except for years ending in 00 unless the year ending in 00 is divisible by 400) we'd get left behind, so we have to take a giant leap for mankind.
And Bob's your uncle.
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