Dwain Northey (Gen X)

As someone who takes delight in language—its quirks, its secret histories, its strange betrayals—I’ve always been fascinated (and mildly annoyed) by the word October. After all, I learned early on that octo- means eight. An octopus has eight tentacles. An octagon has eight sides. An octave spans eight notes. Consistency is a beautiful thing, especially for those of us who savor the architecture of words. But then October arrives, strutting onto the calendar as the tenth month of the year, as if it either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that its very name is screaming eight. It’s linguistic gaslighting of the highest order.

The confusion, however, isn’t the fault of the word—it’s the fault of history. Originally, in the Roman calendar (before Julius Caesar and his reforming pen showed up), the year began in March. That made March the first month, April the second, and so on. In that arrangement, October really was the eighth month. Its neighbors, September (septem = seven) and November (novem = nine), and December (decem = ten) all fit neatly in line like disciplined soldiers marching in numerical order. Back then, the language was logical, the numbers matched, and the world of Latin etymology made sense.

But human meddling has a way of upsetting linguistic order. Around 45 BCE, Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar, realigning the year so it began in January rather than March. This little act of bureaucratic calendar reform nudged all the months forward, and suddenly October was bumped down to tenth place. The name, however, didn’t change. Language is often stubborn like that—it clings to its roots even when the world it describes has shifted. So now, October is the tenth month with a name forever bound to the number eight.

This leaves us with a delightful absurdity. The calendar is a living fossil of Roman political tinkering, and the word October carries inside it the ghost of an earlier time. To a language connoisseur, that’s part of the beauty: words don’t just describe the present—they preserve the past. They carry within them little time capsules of history, reminding us of the way the world once was.

Of course, the irony extends beyond October. September still parades around as the “seventh” month even though it’s the ninth. November and December, meanwhile, are two months late to their own numerical party. It’s as if the entire final quarter of the year is one long running joke, a reminder that language is a patchwork quilt stitched across centuries, never perfectly aligned.

So yes, October may not be the eighth month anymore, but in its name, it remains forever octo—forever linked to the linguistic family of octagons and octopuses. And maybe that’s fitting. After all, the beauty of language is not in its perfection but in its contradictions, in the way it reveals history even when it seems illogical. October is a word out of time, a reminder that while numbers may be rigid, language bends and meanders, carrying echoes of the past into the present.