The odds are that Clark County has approximately 350 leaplings. And to those people who because a wrinkle in time often feel left out, we say, “Happy birthday!”
Today is leap day, the quadrennial (almost) appearance of Feb. 29 on the Gregorian calendar. And with a leap year appearing every four years (not quite), that means that roughly every 1,461 days is a Feb. 29 (we’ll get to that in a minute). Journalists are notoriously math-challenged, but if one of every 1,461 Clark County residents was born on Feb. 29, we have approximately 350 local leaplings celebrating birthdays today.
As mentioned, leap year arrives every four years. Americans long ago decided to celebrate the occasion by electing a president in the same year, although that might just be a coincidence. And we don’t think Baron Pierre de Coubertin was particularly smitten with leap years, but the Summer Olympics that he founded just happen to run on the same calendar.
So, 2000 and 1960 and 1920 and many years in between have brought us elections and Olympics and leap days at the end of February. But not 1900, which is where it gets confusing.
As the United States Naval Observatory explains: “Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.”
Phew! Glad we cleared that up. And if our math is correct, 2100 will not be a leap year. Just in case you need to mark your calendar.
For some people, apparently, all of this makes sense. Many centuries ago, humans figured out that it takes Earth 365 days to orbit the Sun, so they decided to define one year as 365 days. But they also noticed that it’s not exactly 365 days.
As the website for the National Air and Space Museum explains: “It takes Earth 365.242190 days to orbit the Sun, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 56 seconds. … That extra 5 hours, 48 minutes and 56 seconds needs to be accounted for somehow. If we didn’t account for this extra time, the seasons would begin to drift. … Over a period of about 700 years our summers, which we’ve come to expect in June in the northern hemisphere, would begin to occur in December.”
Hence, the creation of leap day. Because we wouldn’t want to be harvesting pumpkins in April or celebrating college basketball with September Madness.
All of this, of course, is the result of the human construct that is time. Regardless of how long we say a year or a day or a minute is, it won’t alter the length of time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun or how long it takes our planet to make one rotation. It will simply change how we choose to define it.
That being said, we’re still perplexed at how a day ended up being 24 hours and an hour ended up being 60 minutes. We won’t try to explain those quirks; for now, the focus is on people who are celebrating birthdays today as part of a relatively exclusive club.
There’s even an Honor Society of Leap Day Babies, with a website that includes a lexicon known as a “leaptionary.” It is there we can learn that “leapabilly” is any music with a leap year reference.
Those leap day babies have plenty to celebrate. Somebody born on Feb. 29, 1940, can finally legally drink. Somebody born on Feb. 29, 1960, is now eligible for a driver’s license. And we’re guessing they’ve never heard those jokes before.
But regardless of their age, we hope their celebration today has been worth the wait.
