Once In A Blue Moon.

June this year in Australia is a Blue Moon month. This is a time when there are two full moons in the one month. It happens on average once every 2.72 Years. Thus is reasonably rare, hence the phrase.

The phrase “Once in a blue moon “ has been around for over 400 years now and like a lot of old sayings; the original meaning has been confused and perhaps hidden among many possibilities. According to the Newspaper where I got this information, there are at least 6 common possible sources floating around. The most obvious is that, when the air is damp and heavy, the water droplets scatter red and green light, allowing other colours to pass through. Thus a white moonbeam passing through such a misty cloud turns blue and would be observable with a full moon.

Likewise at other times, clouds of ice-crystals, fine-grained sand, volcanic ash or smoke from forest fires, can also make the moon look blue.

Despite the above facts, I wonder how many of us can actually claim to have ever seen anything resembling a blue Moon? Most of us never have and probably never will, but we all know the saying and many of us use it, when we wish to indicate a rarity of appearance of something or someone. But why?

Why do we use something we don’t have any idea what its origin or original purpose was? Probably because it works! We may not know how or why but we know it works. And also while we may not know what it meant then, we know what it means now and we know that the people we are dealing with also know what we mean.

We don’t need to know every thing about something to make full use of it but we do need to make sure when we use something like this saying that others do indeed know what we mean and are not out there every night looking for a literal Blue Moon. Again what say you?