My son seems to have become more comfortable speaking English at home since we spent 18 days in Scotland over the summer. Before going to Scotland, my wife and I had to keep telling him to speak English at home, and he kept switching back into Japanese. I haven’t had to tell him to use English recently.
But because he doesn’t use English at school, there are many things he doesn’t know how to say in English. He didn’t know the names of the months, for example.
So my wife decided to teach him the names of the months in English, from January to December.
I heard her telling him that October was the tenth month. She tried to tell my son about an interesting fact about October.
“October is the tenth month,” she said, “But ‘oct’ means a different number, not 10. Think of an octopus. Can you guess what number ‘oct’ means?”
“An octopus has eight legs, so it must be eight,” said my son.
So far so clever. Of course we actually call the “legs’ of an octopus “tentacles,” but he was doing very well with his answer.
“And can you guess why the name of the tenth month means ‘eighth month’?” she asked.
That was quite a difficult question. The real reason is that October used to be the eighth month. Then two Roman emperors added an extra month each, which pushed October back. Julius Caesar added July and Augustus added August.
My son’s face lit up. “I’ve got it!” he said. “Octopuses used to have ten legs. Then they evolved, and now they have only eight!”
It was an imaginative answer. Maybe in the waters around Osaka, an octopus which evolved with two fewer tasty looking tentacles to be put into takoyaki would have a survival advantage.
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