People have always needed to distinguish the different days of the week. True, in times past, every day was exactly the same — apart from the Sabbath day of rest — but, even then, someone might need to arrange to meet someone else in a few days’ time. So it made sense to give names to the days.
We’ve inherited three of the names for our days from the Old English, three from the Norse and just one from the Romans:
Sunday is from the Old English
sunnandaeg, meaning ‘day of the sun’.
Monday is from the Old English
monandaeg, or ‘day of the moon’.
Tuesday is from the Old English
tiwesdaeg, for the Norse god of combat.
Wednesday is from wodnesdaeg,
after the supreme Norse god Woden.
Thursday is from thorsdaeg, after
the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
Friday is from frigedaeg, after Frige,
the Norse goddess of beauty, wife of Woden.
Saturday is named after Saturn, the
Roman god of agriculture and the harvest.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast the names of the days of the week in English and French. Whereas we have just one day named after a Roman god (Saturday), the French have several: they call Tuesday mardi (Mars’s Day), Wednesday mercredi (Mercury’s Day), Thursday jeudi (Jupiter’s Day) and Friday vendredi (Venus’s Day). As for Monday, we’re all agreed that it’s the day of the moon: we call it Monday and they call it lundi (the French word for moon is lune).
WHERE’S IT FROM?
AIN’T
Although it’s almost always used as slang, there is one example where it’s not only acceptable but also absolutely correct and that is as a contraction of the words ‘am not’. In other words, wherever you would use the words ‘am not’ or ‘am I not’, you should use the word ‘ain’t’ instead.
Take the following expression: ‘I’m a good person, aren’t I?’
That’s incorrect, it should be ‘I’m a good person, ain’t I?’ Why? Because ‘aren’t I’ is a contraction of ‘are not I’. Well, you don’t say, ‘I are a good person’, do you? So you shouldn’t say, ‘I’m a good person, are not I?’ However, ‘I’m a good person, ain’t I?’ works because it’s a quicker way of saying, ‘I’m a good person, am not I’ and that is absolutely correct.