GWOTD, February 30, 2008

The word of the day for February 30, 2008 is "omnipotent" — adjective 1 often capitalized : almighty 1. 2: having virtually unlimited authority or influence [an omnipotent ruler]. 3 obsolete : arrant.

The date in the header would be correct if Big Julie had kept his hands off the calendar. Of course the calendar was in such bad shape by the time Julius Caesar put his thumbs on it that stealing a day from February to make the month named after him was a very small offense.

The French tried to reorganise the calendar when they had their revolution. They renamed all the months—did away with the names of gods and goddesses—and straightened out the numbering system so the days were more evenly divided between months. For some reason this new system did not stick, whereas, the new Gregorian system which helped remove the precession of the equinox, eventually caught on everywhere European colonialism did. Ah, people—we rejected the new calendar, and the metric system (which my dad always insisted was a Communist plot) has yet to be fully adopted. We don't have a tyrant like Big Julie to enforce a single universal system. C'mon StarDate.

Our quote for the day is from George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. speech, Jan. 20, 1935, on BBC radio. “Mr. G.B. Shaw on Film Censorship,” The Drama Observed, ed. Bernard F. Dukore, Penn State Press (1993):

     The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.

;^) Jan

Tags: omnipotent