-4
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
-4 points (35.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
29525 readers
199 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Pretty sure moon in that context means month, so it would be like two years at minimum
Really? Always took it literally, like… that many moons have come and gone.
Nope, a "moon" was a single cycle of the moon through its phases, which is closest to a month out of the units we use currently.
While you can ignore that and use the word however you want, and it's definitely possible that people have done so as a form of word play to indicate shorter units of time, it does have a usage that's been around for a least a couple hundred years in English, and way longer in other languages.
The word month comes from moon, and in other languages, the words for month are usually also derived from their words for moon.
In English, the way the word evolved, a it was the period of time from one "new" moon to the next.
Many moons, as a phrase, came from a native American term that was used to express "a long, but undetermined time ago". It isn't exclusive to any specific peoples, nor only to native Americans, but the English idiom version came from a translation from a native speaker
Trade is, however, a similar term for "a long time" that's used almost exclusively an an exaggeration, "a month of Sundays". In a literal sense, that would mean approximately 30 Sundays, obviously, which isn't even a full year, but it's almost always used to express a much longer, but unspecified, time frame.
Oh wow. Turned this attempt at a shower thought into a TIL.
Thank you for the knowledge!