FEBRUARY FILL DIKE1

by James Lincoln Warren

One of things I enjoy most when writing a story is coming up with names for my characters, and occasionally even names for my locales—there is no place I’m aware of in Devonshire called Warcoombe, for example, the site of one of my stories, but I loved the sound of it, because it was alliterative with “witch” and the town represents something of a battleground. Cute, eh?

Many of us have written about coming up with names before, from our own scribblings to those of such luminaries as Westlake and Block, so I won’t dwell on that aspect of things further. But today is the first day of February. What’s in a name? Glad you asked.

The name of the month that starts today, like the names of all the months, comes from the Romans.

January was named in honor of the Roman god Janus, the god of gates and beginnings, whose head has a face on both front and back, looking in both directions at once. March was named in honor of Mars, the god of war, whereas April‘s origins are obscure—the word was probably from the Etruscan, a language known to be unrelated to any other, so there’s no telling what it originally meant. May is called after Maia, the mother of the great god Hermes in Greek mythology, and by association, considered the mother of his Roman counterpart Mercury; June after Juno, the wife of Jupiter. Except for April, these months all contained festivals to honor the gods after which they were named—the months were most probably named to commemorate the festivals.

July and August were named in memory of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus respectively, after they were deified by the Senate. The rest of the months, September, October, November and December, are designated very simply and logically by numbers—although September is now our ninth month, it was originally the seventh, because the Romans (and most Europeans until well into the second millennium) regarded March, the first month of spring, as the first month of the year. And so October is the eighth month, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

February was also named after a festival, but not after a god. Februa is a Latin word of Sabine origin—the Sabines being a distinct ethnicity from the Latins—meaning “means of purification; expiatory offerings” (Oxford Latin Dictionary). The Februum was the Roman festival of purification, conducted on the 15th day of the month.

The religious origin of calendar names is something I find extremely interesting, there being nothing more mysterious, and hence magical or divine, than the passing of time. Our days of the week likewise have religious significance, albeit mostly from our Teutonic forebears: Tuesday is named after Tíw, the Norse god of war (and in French, Tuesday is mardi, Mars’s day), Wednesday after Woden (Odin), Thursday after Thor, and Friday after Frigg (the goddess of love, cf. the French vendredi after Latin “Veneris” = Venus). For whatever reason, Saturday was named after the Roman god Saturn, Sunday after the sun and Monday after the moon—but we all know that the sun and moon are also manifestations of deities.

It has been said that the most powerful human act is the act of naming things. By attaching religious significance to the components of time, it’s as if our ancestors were admitting that time was one of the things beyond their control, like the weather.

What godlike power it is, then, to assign names to things—if not to control them, at least to control how they are perceived. Adam’s first cognitive act in the Bible is to name the animals, although God himself has already given names to the geographical features of Eden (Genesis 2:19-20):

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field . . .

As I mentioned in opening, several of us here at CB have written about the naming of fictional characters. Because it is such an ancient and, yes, sacred act, the giving of names should never be haphazard. There should always be some meaning or intention behind the choice, not just because it’s one of the ways we have to draw the character, but also because the act itself is part of the story, a gift we should never take for granted or ignore. At the other end of the Bible, in the Gospel according to St. John, there is another take on names:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Talk about divine power and spiritual significance.

Purification? You bet. The gift of naming is pure magic.

1. My title comes from an English proverb dating back to at least to the 16th century — it’s a reminder that the weather in February is prone to unload either lots of snow or rain and to fill dikes up to the brim. The illustration is a painting by Benjamin Williams Leader dated 1881, with the same title, although it actually shows an evening in November. So sue me. [↩]