It's time to bone up on your understanding of Leap Year and Leap Day, February 29, 2016. The science is pretty simple. Most of the world uses the Gregorian calendar (also called Western or Christian calendar) after it replaced the Julian calendar because of its inaccuracies.
The 365 days are divided into 12 months and divided into 30 or 31 days, except February, which has 28. Well, except for Leap Year, when it has 29. Remember the rhyme? The extra day was added to February, because it had fewer days after the adjustments calculated by how long it takes the earth to go around the sun.
That trip takes five hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds longer. If the solar year can be divided by either 4 or 400, it's a Leap Year.
All sorts of folklore, superstitions and traditions have developed over the past 2000 years. The Irish supposedly balanced the tradition of men proposing to women by allowing them to do the honors during Leap Year, but not on Leap Day.
In several European countries, Leap Day was called Bachelor's Day; any man who refused a woman's proposal paid a penalty of 12 pairs of gloves, one for each month to hide her embarrassment of a bare engagement finger. Greeks considered it unlucky to marry in a Leap Year and the Scots deemed it unlucky to be born on Leap Day.
Are you a leapling? If so, you share your birthday with Lord Byron, Dinah Shore and Tony Robbins, among others, and the odds were only one in 1,461. With a real birthday coming every four years, you're just 11 years old, not 44.
