A Month of Sundays

Your compiler saw an old friend recently, who exclaimed, “Dan, I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”   The two of us visited a while and then moved on, but your compiler was left wondering where that marvelous old expression, which he assumed is Southern,  might have come from.

    In the South, we never mean it literally; a month of Sudays is technically thirty weeks, or two hundred ten days.  The friend your compiler mentioned above was one he had not seen in at least five years, so one can easily see what he means by our rather loose usage of the phrase.

     Well, blow your compiler down and run him over!  Drive him off the steep side of the Starr’s Mill Dam armed with nothing more threatening than a chicken feather and a limp dishrag!  “A month of Sundays” isn’t Southern at all; it’s old English, so incredibly old that “Olde English” would be the appropriate way to express it, twee though that spelling has become.

     It seems “a month of Sundays” entered the language back around 900 A.D., and has thus survived the “thee/thou/thy” and “-eth endings on verbs” stages of our tongue.  Christianity was well established in the British Isles by the 900, and presumably by then Sundays were set-apart days – Sabbath days – days of no work and probably no recreation.  In other words, dull as dirt, most likely.

     So we get a glimpse of why today’s users of “a month of Sundays” generally mean a long, long time – a lot longer than 30 weeks…longer than 210 days.  Sundays, almost certainly, were BORING in the 900s – tediously slow – so a month of Sundays, while literally only 30 weeks, tended to feel more like several years.

     That sounds like many seminars, some sports contests, and an occasional sermon your compiler has sat through.  And lest he monopolize your attention for what seems like a month of Sundays on this self-same topic…yawn…he’ll sign off now.  Sayonara (which he thinks is the Southern Japanese word for “goodbye.”)