March Madness

Its also the start of March Madness! I can't believe its already here!!! Can you? I have to admit, I haven't followed basketball AT ALL this year, and so my bracket that I filled out may get broken later on tonight. I mean, basically, when you pick Notre Dame to win it all, you're taking a gamble. Which is what I did. Hopefully they won't be the 5 over 12 upset this year.

Also, I've got a 3 day weekend! Due to Easter and Good Friday, we don't have lecture tomorrow. Unfortunately what that really means is that I just have more time tomorrow to study. But at least we won't be getting pages and pages of new material. So maybe I'll get caught up (or get ahead...wait that couldn't possible happen!) However, tonight I plan to watch a lot of basketball. In honor of Maundy Thursday.

Which brings us to the question of the day. Today, the question is:

What does Maundy mean?

The answer:

Maundy, which sounds an awful lot like 'Monday' comes from the old English words "mawn" and "dein". "Mawn" means "before" (loosely), but the use of the 'w' denotes that the thing that is "before" also comes first in a number series. Who knew the old English had such crazy words (for the record, the alternative spelling replaces the 'w' with 'gg' and changes the meaning of "maggn" to "before" in a "causal sense"). "Dein" is simply an old English word roughly equivalent to "Friday".
So the real meaning is Mawn-dein, or "Before Friday in a number series". Thus, Maundy Thursday literally means "Before Friday in a number series Thursday". Which doesn't make a lot of sense and is quite redundant. However, in some languages, repetition denotes emphasis, especially with regards to royalty and religious topics, therefore this refers to the day before Good Friday.

And you don't have to take my word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maundy_Thursday