One of the convenient fictions we live by holds that there are exactly 365 days in a year. In point of fact, the earth turns roughly 365 and a quarter times on its axis by the time it has completed a full year's orbit around the sun, which means that periodically the calendar has to play catch-up -- thus the convention of leap years. A leap year, of which 2008 is one, contains one extra day, February 29, for a total of 366.
So, where does the "leap" come in? This is a perennial source of confusion. Normally, a calendar date that falls on a Monday one year will fall on Tuesday the next, and on Wednesday the year after that. But every fourth year, thanks to the extra day, we "leap" over Thursday and that calendar date lands on Friday instead.
Even more abstruse is the arithmetical formula used to designate leap years, here described as succinctly as one could ever hope by Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, author of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
[A leap year is] any year whose date is exactly divisible by 4 except those which are divisible by 100 but not 400.
Why such complexity? Because the exact number of days in a solar year is actually slightly less than 365.25 (it is 365.242374, to be precise), so the algorithm had to be designed such that a leap year is skipped now and then to keep the calendar on track over the long haul.
Leap year folklore
Persons born on February 29 are called "leaplings" or "leapers." However fun it may be to rib them about the fact that they'll enjoy 75 percent fewer birthdays than the rest of us over the course of their lives, they do have the special privilege between leap years of celebrating their nativity a full day earlier than usual, if they choose. It was once thought that leapling babies would inevitably prove sickly and "hard to raise," though no one remembers why.
Ironically, notwithstanding the fact that the whole point of adding an extra day to February every four years was to align the human measurement of time more closely with nature, in days gone by folks apparently believed that monkeying with the calendar in such a way could actually throw nature out of whack, even hampering the raising of crops and livestock. It was said, for example, that beans and peas planted during a leap year "grow the wrong way" -- whatever that means -- and, in the words of the Scots, "Leap year was never a good sheep year."
Ladies' privilege
In keeping with the theme of nature gone awry, a whimsical tradition dating back at least four centuries (and still trotted out at four-year intervals by newspaper feature writers) holds that leap years confer upon women the "privilege" of proposing marriage to men instead of the other way around. The convention was (in literature, if not in reality) that any man who refused such a proposal owed his spurned suitor a silk gown and a kiss -- provided she was wearing a red petticoat at the moment she popped the question.
The origin of this romantic tradition is long forgotten and steeped in legend. One tidbit often repeated in 19th-century sources claimed it grew out of a statute passed by Scottish Parliament in 1288, of which one of the many quoted versions reads:
It is statut and ordainit that during the reine of hir maist blissit Magestie, ilk maiden ladye of baith highe and lowe estair shale hae libertie to bespeak ye man she likes; albiet, gif he refuses to tak her till be his wif, he sall be mulcit in ye sume of ane hundredth poundis or less, as is estait mai be, except and alwais gif he can mak it appear that he is betrothit to ane other woman, then he shall be free.
Mind you, this passage was already considered suspect by some of the same Victorian authors who quoted it -- not only because the text couldn't be sourced ("the only authority for this statement is the 'Illustrated Almanac' for 1853," wrote one critic, "which probably manufactured the statute as a jest") but also because its "old English" phraseology rings too modern for the year 1288. In addition, the text itself proved to be quite variable -- in regards to grammar, spelling, and even content, with some versions boasting an extra clause specifying that the law pertained to "ilk yeare knowne as lepe yeare."
