Seek to
Today’s English expression is “seek to.” We’re going to use “seek to” with another verb. We use this when we’re talking about what something or someone is trying to do.
Remember when we talked about corporate mission statements ? The mission statement of a company describes what that company’s purpose or mission in the world is. What is the company trying to do? Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. So we can say that Google seeks to organize the world’s information. That is its purpose or mission.
Often we use “seek to” with the intention of a policy or a change. Remember the new law in New York about pay transparency ? The law requires that employers post a salary range for all jobs they list in public. The new policy seeks to reduce the gap in pay between men and women. That is the policy’s intention.
And in today’s lesson you learned—we both learned!—that the Julian calendar, which was in place from 46 B.C. until the year 1582, the Julian calendar had an average of 365.25 days per year. But astronomically, there are 365.2419 days. So each year of the Julian calendar moved about twelve minutes away from the true astronomical year. That adds up over the centuries!
The Gregorian calendar of 1582 sought to correct that imperfection . “Sought to” is the past tense of “seek to.” The Gregorian calendar sought to correct the imperfections in the calendar that came before it. The new calendar took away a leap day three times every four hundred years. The Gregorian calendar, therefore, has a long-term average of 365.2422 days.
Now you’ll notice that this is still not precisely , astronomically, accurate . Our current calendar year—get ready to lose your mind—our current calendar year is 26 seconds longer than the true astronomical year.
This did not sit well with the astronomer John Herschel. In the 1800s, he sought to correct this imperfection. He proposed that we remove one leap day every 4,000 years—he wanted to take one day off the calendar every four thousand years— I swear !—to bring the current calendar closer into alignment with the astronomical year. He proposed removing February 29 from every year divisible by 4,000. The next time that would happen is in the year 4000. Under the Gregorian calendar, it’s divisible by 400, so it would be a leap year. Herschel’s proposal was to remove that day, so that over thousands of years the Gregorian calendar would be more accurate.
John Herschel died in 1871, but his dream is not dead. Humanity still has time to correct the mistake in the Gregorian calendar. We still have 1,977 years before we would have to remove Herschel’s extra day from the calendar.
Quote of the Week
Here’s a quote from Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind the Peanuts comic strip . We talked about him on Thursday. Here’s what he said: “ Be yourself . Nobody can say you’re doing it wrong .”
I love that! “Be yourself. Nobody can say you’re doing it wrong.”
See you next time!
That’s all for today’s Plain English.
By the way, we may never get a year to be exactly a year. The speed of the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down, so that the length of a day is changing—very, very slightly—every year. And so that means there will be more days in an astronomical year, when measured over many centuries.
It doesn’t matter for us. As long as our calendar has a Monday and a Thursday, you’ll have Plain English twice a week. I don’t think Pope Francis is trying to change the calendar any time soon . So that means we are back on Thursday with a new lesson. See you then!
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