Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the best actors in the history of cinema, is making viral videos and posting them on Reddit. The Austrian Death Machine went undercover (like in Kindergarten Cop) as Howard, a Gold's Gym manager in Venice, CA., to promote heath and fitness and the All-Stars after school workout program. Some people recognized the former California Governor and others didn't.

• Cvandyke / Shutterstock.com

Martin Luther King Day is almost upon us, and I thought it would be altogether fitting and proper for Word Odyssey to explore some of the words and phrases of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” But I was too intimidated. Some works of prose are best savored without garnish. So instead I thought I’d celebrate MLK Day by taking a look at some of the words that stand for the institutions and legacies that Dr. King and other civil rights activists sought to overcome.

A work of animatronic genius.

• Image courtesy of Shutterstock
• She doesn't care where the word came from; she's ready for Friday

Why are there seven days in a week? And those names like Tuesday and Wednesday, with their funny spellings: where did they come from and what in the world do they mean? Your inner nerd wants to know. Last week it was the origin of the months, this week it’s days of the week.

The seven day week has been around for a long time, going back to Mesopotamia. Every once in awhile someone tries a different number of days—Julius Caesar thought that eight was better; the Soviet Union experimented with five and six; the early French Republic, when they weren’t busy lopping heads off, attempted to turn time into a rational decimal (ten-based) system, including the week. But over time the lucky number seven has stuck.

Why seven? One guess is that it’s because the naked eye can see seven heavenly bodies that mysteriously move out of sync with the stars. The astrological thinking was that the heavenly bodies governed time; and the Romans did name the days after the pagan gods who were associated with these heavenly bodies.

The seven Roman days of the week were, in Latin: dies lunae, the “day of the moon”; dies Martis, for Mars, the Roman god of war; dies Mercurii, for the wandering god Mercury; dies Jovis, for Jove, who was the big enchilada in the pantheon; dies Veneris, for Venus, the goddess of love; dies Saturnii, for the god of the harvest; and dies solis, the Sun god.

In Spanish, Monday through Friday are: lunes, martes, miercoles, jueves, and viernes. These resemble the Latin names because Spanish evolved from Latin, as did the other Romance languages. Spanish-speakers will notice that something funny happened to Saturday and Sunday. Saturn and Sun got dropped, and replaced with Sabado and Domingo. Sabado is from Sabbath, the origin of which is shabat, Hebrew for “to cease” because it’s a day of rest. Domingo is rooted in the Latin word for Lord, referring to Jesus Christ, as in “anno domini”, the year of our Lord.

But how about the English days of the week? The English calendar was adopted from the Roman calendar, but the Latin days of the week were transferred to the Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Dies solis became Sunnen daeg, or day of the Sun, shortened to Sunday. Dies lunii was transferred to monnen daeg, for moon day, now corrupted to Monday.

For Tuesday through Friday, the Anglo-Saxons preferred their own gods. So the Norse god of war, Tyr, substituted for Mars. Tyr lost a hand during a trick the gods were playing on Fenris, a monster wolf. So Tyr was known as one-handed, and not a reconciler of men—the gods of war seldom are. In Old English Tyr evolved to Tiw, so the day became Tiwsdaeg, which is now Tuesday.

The god Wodin was thought to resemble the wandering Mercury. Wodin was known as the god of the hunt, but he also ran a hall in which warriors slain in battle could carouse during the afterlife. Wodin travels the world in disguise, as an old man with a long white beard—sort of like a sad Santa Clause—and has lent his name to Wednesday.

You’ve surely seen Jupiter depicted as raining lightning bolts from the heavens to frighten we mortals. In Northern Europe, Thor had somewhat the same job. So Jupiter got swapped out for Thor, and we now we have Thorsdaeg, which we modern English speakers call Thursday.

The Germanic goddess of love, Frigg, took the place of Venus, so now we say “thank goddess it’s Friggdaeag”—or something like that. A painting shows Frigg spinning clouds, like cloth from cotton—a lovely thought. After three straight days named after masculine, war-related gods it’s nice to finish the work week with love. By the way, you might recognize the Germanic root “fri” in some other friendly English words, including friend and free. So we can remember Fridays with love, freedom and friendship—and happy hour.

Word Odyssey is a weekly column on words, their origins and the stories that go with them. It appears each Thursday on The Range.

While the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus might be the most famous act around, it's not the oldest. Or, for that matter, the oddest.

That distinction might go to the Zoppe´Family Circus, which traces its roots back to 1842 Europe and was borne from a French street clown and a Hungarian ballerina stealing off in the night to Venice. The act is now in its sixth generation of performers, and it's spending this weekend at Reid Park.

Performances are scheduled for Friday night (7 p.m.), Saturday (1, 4 and 7 p.m.) and Sunday (1 and 4 p.m.) in what UA Presents — which is sponsoring the circus — calls a "charming one-ring tent" on the southwest part of Reid Park near 22nd Street and Country Club Road.

This is the third year in a row Zoppe´has come to Tucson, said Chad Lehrman, a marketing specialist for UA Presents. In addition to the circus itself, from 12 to 4 p.m. Saturday the UA will hold a Children's Festival at Reid Park.

• Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

It’s time to feed your inner nerd.

It’s the new year, so it’s a good time to talk about time, and when eggheads start talking about time, they can get really worked up. St. Augustine asked: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." The Ancient Greek Sophists denied that time is real, saying that it is merely a concept or a measurement. And don’t even get me started on Einstein’s space-time continuum.

So I’m going to bring time down to earth and just talk about the months of the year, which is confusing all by itself, starting with the word month. It’s a Germanic word derived from moon, probably because some early ways of tracking time were based on the lunar cycle. That, by the way, is 29.5 days from new moon to new moon. That cycle doesn’t track with an even number of days. Nor does it track with seasons, which are important for hunters, gatherers, farmers, and snowbirds. That’s why we now base calendars on the sun. That’s problematic too, since we circle the sun every 365.25 days, but it’s more easily corrected with a leap year. Anyway, our solar calendar is divided into months, which comes from the moon cycle. Got that?

Months are confusing, too, when you look at September, October, November and December. These months are from the Latin numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10. But they are months 9 through 12 on our calendar. Back in the days of the old Roman (pre-Julian) calendar, when there were only 10 months, September through December were in fact months 7 through 10. But the Roman calendar had gotten seriously out of whack with solar year—the first month, January, fell in autumn—so Julius Caesar decreed a new calendar. When he did, he inserted two more months, which pushed September through December to months 9 through 12.

Let’s go to the month that begins the year. January is named after the Janus, the Roman god of transitions. He’s usually depicted as two-faced, looking both backward and forward. That’s why the first month of the year bears his name: out with the old, in with the new. February is named after a Roman purification ritual and festival. Februus, the god of the dead, was actually invented later based on this festival. March, of course, comes from Mars, the Roman god of war. In the Roman climate, March is springtime, and that meant it was time to call up the legions and conquer somebody.

April is a tricky one. The month of April was sacred to the Roman goddess Venus, who is modeled after Greek goddess Aphrodite. So it’s possible that April is a kind of riff on Aphrodite. Or it might come from a Latin word for opening, because it’s the time of year when trees and flowers bloom. No one’s quite sure. The Anglo-Saxons called the same time of year “oster monath”, possibly derived from the goddess of dawn, which is where we get the word Easter. That lusty month of May is aptly named after Maia, a Greek fertility goddess. The Romans held the celebration for their own fertility goddess, Bona Dea, in the month of May.

Juno was Jupiter’s wife, and worshipped as the goddess of marriage and the household. Back then it was considered good luck to be married in June, and we still talk about lucky June brides today. July used to be Quintilus, the fifth month. But the Roman Emperor Augustus renamed it in honor of Julius Caesar, who was born in that month. Augustus didn’t have what you would call a small ego, so he thought he deserved a month named after himself, especially after conquering Marc Antony, Cleopatra and Egypt. So he renamed (or had the Senate rename) the month Sextus to August. Oddly, though, he didn’t pick his birth month to bear his name. Instead he picked the birth month of Cleopatra, Egypt’s last ruler. (This was a considerable improvement on the Anglo-Saxon name for the month, which was Weodmonad—weed month). Other Roman emperors, including Nero, tried instituting months bearing their names, but were thankfully unsuccessful.

Well, I’m out of time, whatever that is. See you next week (hint).

Word Odyssey is a weekly column on words, their origins and the stories that go with them. It appears each Thursday on The Range.

• Image courtesy of Shutterstock

It’s that jolly time of year, so today I’ll feed your inner nerd with the origins of Santa Claus.

Santa Claus is the Americanized name for St. Nicholas, a 4th Century bishop in what is now modern day Turkey. (More on that in a minute). When the Dutch settled New Amsterdam—today’s New York—they brought with them the tradition of Sinterklass, with “sint” meaning “saint”, followed by “heer”, meaning “mister”, and “klass” being a contraction of “niklass”—so, in English, it became St. Nicholas. During American myth-making in the 1800’s, one thread kept to the English name St. Nicholas while another thread eventually Americanized Sinterklaas to Santa Claus, which is really a curious combination of Latin-derived “santa” and the Germanic “Nicholas”.

• Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

To feed your inner nerd, today I’m going to open up Pandora’s box. I’ve been boning up on well worn expressions, so today’s theme is the stories behind some of these sayings. If you have a bone to pick with this show, put a sock in it. That phrase originated with Old Victrolas, which didn’t have volume control, but did have those huge speakers, so when the kids played the music too loud, Dad would yell “put a sock in it!”

Last night, Weekly Web Lord Henry Barajas noted that the bust of John F. Kennedy appears to have been stolen from Downtown's El Presidio Park, and offered his suggestion for a replacement: President Barack Obama.



Now, I'm not necessarily disputing Henry's claim that Barry O is the best President that we've ever had, but I'm fairly certain that there's a sizable portion segment of Arizona's population that would regularly practice sledge hammer use on an Obama bust.



So, to keep the City and various potential bust donors from throwing their money away like sand into so many potholes, here's a quickly brainstormed list, without comment, of Tucsonans (and Tucsonans) we could bust-ify instead of Obama: