Lost Days & Found Youth
Gen Alpha positivity, the 1582 Adjustment, training montages.
đ§ Prefer to listen? Hit play above to hear this weekâs dispatch in my dulcet/mellifluous tones.
Greetings, welcome to another of my little forays in culture and curiosities. I am grateful you have me in your inbox and in your week. Hereâs whatâs on offer today, with a side of virtual filter coffee.
Slang It! : Smiles with Gen Alpha
The Lost Days: How our calendar skipped time.
Friday Find: Training to Buy
With: Potato superheroes, Tiktok brain, bizzare tourism & The Decemberists.
1. Slang it, Gen Alpha!
A couple of Gen Alpha tidbits to kick off. Generational cohorts often get a bad rap- easy targets, I feel (and I always try to go easy on casual demographic slotting). Here, a millennial and many alphas give us smiles, and positivity.
âWhat hope for the next genâ is frequent a lament; the answer and the hope lies most of all, with the young ones themselves. As they remind us, every now and then.
This dose of optimism and cuteness comes from eight young girls at the Elisabeth & Robert Badinter College in Angresse, France.
The teenage situation with smartphones and social media is well documented; grappling on how to deal with it is a wild debate. Acknowledging it is probably the first step- none more relevantly than for the kids themselves.
These students decided to dance to talk about it. âThought out and performed by our dancers, we wanted to show how, little by little, the phone takes up all the space, moves us away from others, isolates us... But also how, in movement, we can find ourselves and reconnect with real life inspiration.â
They mention, rightly, as inspiration the CDK company, whose brilliant choreography on the same song by Gotye I shared a while ago.
The kids are gonna be alright.
â
Now for some language lessons. Youth slang has a knack of befuddling and excluding (kinda the point?). I wrote about some Alpha/Z slang last year, looking at both the oddity and inevitability of it all.
A linguist and Youtuber was invited to speak to high school students about the importance of learning language. The very likeable Xiaoma, âa polyglot who has studied dozens of languagesâ, decided to study GenAlpha speak for weeks, then crafted his speech entirely in âtheir languageâ. While it may first seem gimmicky, a step back shows the value it brings both in intent and message.
The video kindly has subtitles for us to understand the actual meaning of his words; (thanks to the beastoftraal for adding the actual Gen Alpha words as captions too- the contrast helps!)
Its also fun to see the spectrum of audience reactions. Some cringe, some slouch passively, some laugh awkwardly, some guffaw, but then many slowly settle in, and actually listen. A sampling of the Youtube comments suggests that large chunks of it resonated- beyond the novelty of it all.
You can watch the full video as well as his speech to future teachers at Ohio State University, here.
2. The Lost Days: the 1582 Adjustment
If, for some an unfathomable but reasonable reason, you happened to scroll your calendar all the way back to say, the year 1582, you might be in for a little surprise. Tucked away in the otherwise inconsequential tenth month is a curious story of missing days, revisionary astronomy, papal instructions and time travel.
The western world aka civilisation as we know it, used a âJulianâ calendar system dating back to around 46 BCE. It overcompensated for the solar year's true length just a tad, and by 1582, this error totalled 10 days.
You might think the most significant problem here was the awareness that we were knowingly calculating our days inaccurately. You would be wrong.
The most pressing problem caused by the error was the increasing difficulty of calculating the âcorrectâ date of, erm, Easter.
Enter Pope Gregory XIII. To get Easter back on track (and solve this fundamental scientific anomaly) the Pope got an Italian scientist- one Luigi Lilio- and a Jesuit mathematician/ astronomer-Christopher Clavius- to propose reforms. Which were? Skip ten days entirely. Nothing complicated.
And so, Gregoryâs papal bull mandated the skipping of October 5â14, 1582. Thus, October 4 was followed immediately by October 15.
If you think this sounds too simple, youâre right.
Our dates, our way.
Catholic nations like Italy and Spain adopted the change immediately. Protestant and Orthodox regions resisted. Lo, just like that, there was a 10-day calendar gap across Europe. Travelers crossing borders suddenly found themselves âtime-travellingâ.
Further adoption of the new âGregorianâ calendar was gradual. (Of course âGregorianâ, because civilisationâs most practical system of time must be named after an individual). Protestant Germany and Netherlands switched in the next century; Britain and its Empire followed in 1752, and the spread of the ânewâ calendar around the globe was well underway.
The British, by then eleven days out of whack, chose to omit September 3â13. This caused public confusion and concern. In this painting depicting an election period scene at the time, we can just about see a captured banner on the floor with the barely-distinguishable words âGive us our Eleven Daysâ. The phrase refers to this calendar shift, of which âmany poorly educated people thought that the government were âstealingâ eleven days of their lives.â Some believed this meant losing part of their lifespan, or that those âdueâ to die during the missing days would somehow escape death!
Russia took it a step further. They did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution. So the famous "October Revolution" actually occurred in November. Go figure.
But my favourite oddityâ because itâs less dramatically consequential to humanity than festival datesâ comes from one William Willett of Endon, North Staffordshire, England. Always sharp to a make a quick buck, he wagered that he could dance non-stop for 12 days and 12 nights. Bets set, he started to jig around the village on the evening of 2 September 1752, and continued all through the night. The next morning was 14 September by the new calendar, so he promptly stopped dancing and claimed his bets!
Predicable! Clear! Efficient!
These inconsistencies led me to seek out some of the other calendars that have been proposed to modern civilisation, usually with a rationale of logic and practicality. A quick look at two:
The International Fixed Calendar (IFC)
Structure: 13 months x 28 days. Exactly 4 weeks per month. Totals 364 days. An extra day ("Year Day") added at the end of the year, not assigned to any week, to reach 365. Leap years add a second extra day. Every month starts on a Sunday, ends on a Saturday. Dates always fall on the same weekday each year.
So very tidy.
The World Calendar Proposed in 1930, this one had support in the League of Nations and later the UN.
Structure: 12 months, divided into four equal quarters of 91 days. Each quarter has 3 months with 31, 30, 30 days. Each quarter begins on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday. Has a âWorldsdayâ (year-end holiday, not part of any week) and âLeapyear Dayâ.
Both âperennial calendarsâ, these promise predictability, simplified scheduling and planning, and repeated dates-weekdays. Note- your birthday will always be the same day of the week; I donât mind, mine would have been Saturday.
These are two of many examples attempting cleaner, more consistent calendar systems. None have managed to overcome the practical challenges, cultural inertia, and religious resistance that come in the way of worldwide adoption.
And none have a Julius or Gregory to back them.
Tangentially speaking.
The very early Roman year (before that Julius chap, and likely devised by Romulus), had only ten months, starting in March. Those legendary Romans simply ignored the roughly 61-day winter period. No work took place during these cold periods, so those days were not assigned any month!
When it came to names in this ten-month calendar, someone clearly got bored quickly- the last six months were named simply for their position in the sequence. Quintilis (5th), Sextilis (6th), September (7th), October (8th), November (9th), December (10th).
Later, those pesky Romans finally decided to add two more months- Januarius and Februarius- to account for their previous callous treatment of the "dead" winter time. But of course, these were placed before March, shifting the rest of the months two positions forward in the year. The original names stuck, which is why our ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth month are actually named after seven, eight, nine and ten respectively.
I informed my offspring about this as they had previously questioned the logic. Now, you know too.
Maybe someone can tell Stagedoor Johnnie?
3. Friday Find: Training to Buy
đđžHereâs a little thumbstopper hailing from South India, set to the cracker "Way Down We Go" by the Icelandic band Kaleo.. âMerely a digital adâ, this is a classic âtraining montageâ for a very intense man (rotor blade punch, anyone?!) preparing for⌠thatâs for you to find out. So watch it first.
Its all kinda ridiculous, really, because its to promote the Day 1 sale at a âsweets & snacksâ shop called âShree Anandhaasâ, which opens its new branch in a new city (Chennai). But it gives pause; you wouldnât see this as an âadâ on social media till recently- a combination of talent, tech and âhustleâ.
shoutout
I also write The Colour Bar, a weekly dispatch on media, entertainment, brands, content, creativity and tech. Do have a look- many of you might find it interesting. This week, I wrote about Wimbledonâs highly curated strategy with brands, amongst much else.
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
Apparently India has risen to âFrench fry superpower statusâ. Munch munch.
Have you heard of Linz? No? This city in Austria wants you to sit up & take notice. Doesnât mean its all pleasant. Watch.
âBefore the next era of TikTok and its clones overwhelms you, it helps to know how we got here and how to run the other direction.â Seldom a bad idea to be reminded of invasive short videos. Little videos are cooking our brains.
Add To Queue
-watchlist, playlist, readlist-
The Decemberists, because it featured in the intensely excellent show The Bear (or is it excellently intense?) ; and also because I am in the midst of a long journey reading the book âWildwoodâ with my kids right now. Wildwood is written by Colin Meloy, the lead singer of The Decemberists.
