I don't know what day you're seeing this, but I'm writing it on a Monday. And it is the Monday-est of Mondays.
One of the most interesting aspects of modern English to me is our ability to verb, adverb, or adjective common nouns the way I just verbed the noun verb, and people still know what we're talking about. So when I say that today is the Monday-est of Mondays, you know what I mean, because we have a cultural understanding of Monday that extends beyond the literal definition of Monday as the second day of the week. Some people might give credit for that to Garfield, but I refuse to believe he should get any credit for anything so that right there is enough reason for me to research this word.
Okay, so Monday... Monday Monday... Can't stand that ah, here we are. Middle English Monedai from Old English Mōndæg, which was a contraction of Mōnandæg. That's a compound word of monan and dæg, which were the words for 'moon' and... 'day'. So Moonday. That's literally what it means, even if you trace those words back through the older Germanic tongues, through Latin, into Greek. It's Moonday.
We actually managed to make it quite a good number of centuries here without drastically splintering the spelling for those words, so good for us. Just lost an 'o' somewhere along the way. But that doesn't really do much to help explain why Monday has such a strong cultural implication for us, and I refuse to accept Garfield as an answer to that. Here, as a data point, allow me to present this proverb circa 1500 that's written in Middle English.
Yf cristemas day on A munday be,
Grete wynter þat yere ye shull see.
Middle English reads a little weird to us Modern English speakers, so let me help you out a bit there. "If Christmas Day on a Monday be, great winter that year ye shall see." So Monday had some sort of implication even back then.
We begin to approach our modern understanding of "The Mondays" in the mid 1750s, however, with reference to Saint Monday, which was the tendency of workers to be sluggish on Monday due to all the hangovers, they having gotten quite drunk the night before. In the early 1800s clergymen would complain of feeling 'Mondayish' due to the exertions of leading worship on Sunday.
So Sun day leads to Moon day, a day traditionally associated with recovering from hangovers or ecclesiastical labor, and even in extreme cases an unusually severe winter. Suffering from a case of the Monday's has been a thing in English for centuries, and the fat, orange cat gets none of the credit.
All of that to say that I really don't want to go to work today. Did it seem like I was stalling? Because I was.
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