The origins of the days of the week have been researched many times, but a new theory has recently emerged which seems to make much more sense than theories that resort to mythology for their explanations. Let’s start with Monday.

Monday is the first day of work after a weekend of rest and recreation. People usually arrive at work weak at the prospect of working until Friday, and when they are not walking around in a daze, spend a lot of their time moaning about the fact. From this we can deduce that originally, this was Moan-day, but with constant use the word, as words often do, became adapted for easier pronuncability.

Having wasted the whole of Monday moaning or in a daze, by Tuesday, people usually begin to engage with their work. It is at this point that, belatedly, they plan out their week, Choosing which tasks will be undertaken this week. And thus we have the origins of the word Choose-day. Of course, English being English, an obvious spelling was never going to fly, hence the odd spelling (Tues) of the original word choose. However, good planning demands more than just a task list. It requires a timetable, and so we come to Wednesday.

Wednesday is traditionally the day when looking at their task list in a daze, people would go weak trying to work it all out. Of course the solution is to order the tasks in order of importance and urgency and thus decide when each will be done. And from this we can see the origin of the word. When’s-day, the day on which it is decided what to do when.

Of course all this moaning and wringing of hands for three days on the trot can distract one from attending to the essentials of life, and by this time, people realise they have not been drinking enough. (By Saturday morning they will have drunk way more of enough of course, but that’s a separate treatise.) In short people will desperately need something to drink, giving us the origin of the name of this day Thirst-day, which once more, for ease of pronunciation elided into Thursday.

It seems so far that very little actual work has got done, and perhaps this explains why week after week, people experienced the same feelings each day.

The work week is almost over and people are thinking about enjoying the weak end. But wait, how can one enjoy a nice juicy steak when the church forbids meat on Fridays. No problem we can have a nice tasty dish of fish and chips instead. Fried of course. How else. And this tradition of serving fried fish and chips on Friday resulted in the day becoming known as Fry-day.

The origins of Saturday were for a long time unknown. People guessed it was perhaps something to do with Saturn and of Roman origin, but recent research has shown that the origins are much older. When a stone tablet from the diggings of the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia was first found, no one realised its significance. But it was at a conference of experts where linguists and culturalists that the light dawned. Culturalists knew that in those days, chairs were normally reserved for nobility. Everyone else either squatted or laid down. The tablet, when translated, and with this extra information, clearly contained an edict that the public were not allowed to sit on the steps of the temple except on one day of the week which, of course, is the true origin of Sat-Ur-Day.

Finally, exhausted by the trials and tribulations of the working week and the confabulations and excess libations of the weak end, we arrive at Sunday. Originally, weeks only had six days, but it was decreed during the time of the agrarian revolution, that once the crops were planted, and until they were ready to be harvested, there would be an extra rest day. This period between sowing and harvesting was during the summer months when (in those days at least) the sun shone most strongly and for longest. It was only natural therefore to name this additional day Sun-day.

So, there you have it. The true origin of the names of the days of the week. Now you can appear erudite at cocktail parties, leaving everyone else weak and in a daze..