Two-sleeves!

When I was at school a teacher told me that the French word for Sunday, Dimanche, had that name because in the olden days people would put on a jacket as well as their usual weekday shirt to go to church.

It makes sense. Di in a word does sometimes mean two (as in carbon dioxide, where two atoms of oxygen are sort of joined to every atom of carbon) and manche certainly means sleeve in French. So Dimanche, I always thought, meant two-sleeves.

Isn't that lovely? And so elegantly French, I thought, to call a day of the week after a fashion choice intead of some random god.

But, sadly, I now discover it's horribly wrong. Dimanche really comes from the Latin word dominica, which means belonging to God.

Personally, I'm really, really gutted about it, too.

Inactivity for today: don't believe everything people tell you.