Early English and Christian Usage
The earliest recorded English usage of the term blue moon was in a 1524 pamphlet violently attacking the English clergy, entitled "Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe" ("Read me and be not angry"): "If they say the moon is belewe / We must believe that it is true."
Another interpretation uses a different definition of the Middle English word belewe, which, in addition to "blue", can mean "betray". By the 16th century, before the Gregorian calendar reform, the medieval computus was out of sync with the actual seasons and the moon, and occasionally spring would have begun and a full moon passed a month before the computus put the first spring moon . Thus, the clergy needed to tell the people whether the full moon was the Easter moon or a false one, which they may have called a "betrayer moon" (belewe moon) after which people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent.
Modern interpretation of the term relates to absurdities and impossibilities; the phrase "once in a blue moon" refers to an event that will take place only at incredibly rare occasions .
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Famous quotes containing the words early, english, christian and/or usage:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
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“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
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