WASHINGTON — A federal advisory panel voted 5-4 on Tuesday to rename Tuesday, concluding after 11 hours of deliberation that the name of the second weekday “does not sound like it is from here” and recommending that it be replaced by July 1.
The Calendar Heritage Review Panel, a nine-member body convened in March under the Continental Nomenclature Office, took up the question after receiving what its chair, Wilma Prost, described by phone as “a significant number of letters,” which she later clarified was four, three of them from the same address. The letters noted that the word Tuesday traces back to Tiw, a figure from Germanic mythology who has never held a federal position or paid federal taxes.
“Nobody is saying Tuesday has done anything wrong,” Prost said, reached at her desk, where she said she was standing because the panel had voted to retire the word “chair” pending review. “Tuesday is a good day. People like Tuesday. But when you say it out loud, you can hear that it came over on a boat, and the panel felt we owed it to the calendar to at least ask.”
The dissenting members argued that the panel had no authority over days of the week and that renaming one would require renaming the others, since Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named for figures from the same mythology, Saturday is Roman, and Sunday and Monday are named for objects in space that have never been to Washington. The majority voted to table the dissent until Thursday, then voted to table Thursday. By 9:15 p.m., the panel had placed five of the seven days of the week under review, leaving only Saturday, which one member said “has never caused anybody any trouble,” and Sunday, which was out of the office. Calendars printed after the vote went to press with a blank column between Monday and Wednesday, and residents of 14 states reported Wednesday morning that they had gone to bed on Monday and woken up a day older with no memory of a staff meeting.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the dispute was the latest in a long tradition of weekday renamings. “The Romans named the days for planets. The Germanic peoples renamed them for gods. In 1411, a council in what is now Belgium renamed Thursday ‘The Lesser Friday’ and then could not figure out when to have Friday,” Achterberg said. “The scholarship is clear that no week has ever survived contact with a committee. I wrote that, but it is still clear.”
Proposed replacements included “Twosday,” “Second Monday,” “Monday Two: The Return,” and “Tuesday (American),” which advanced to a final vote and lost by one. The panel ultimately adopted no replacement, recommending instead that the day continue to occur under its current name until a new one is selected, a process Prost estimated would take “several Tuesdays.”
“We were promised a Tuesday. We will deliver a Tuesday. It will simply be called something else,” she said, before the line went quiet. Asked if she was still there, Prost said she was, but that the panel had just voted 5-4 to review the word “there.”
The panel’s next meeting is scheduled for the second weekday of next week, which the Continental Nomenclature Office said it would announce by name as soon as there was one.
Glenn Whitacre filed this report by phone from a rental car in a parking garage whose levels are labeled by day of the week, on a level that had been taped off.