Sunday, February 8, 2009
What's with the Roman Numerals?
February is the shortest month on the calendar but it often seems one of the longest. Christmas vacation memories have faded and Spring is still far distant. One cure for the Winter blahs: weekend television suddenly improves in February! Some of the most popular special events are scheduled during the February network sweeps. Last Sunday Super Bowl XLIII was broadcast, this Sunday the 51st Annual Grammys are presented, next weekend the NASCAR season kicks off with the 51st running Daytona 500 and on February 22nd the 81st Annual Academy Awards unspool. One thing that puzzles me about these annual televised events. All of the Oscars, the Daytona 500 and the Grammys have been running longer than the Super Bowl, yet the latter is the only one that insists on using roman numerals to track annual events by number. Why is that? Why does only it merit roman numerals while the other events consider everyday ordinals perfectly suitable?. Is it pretense: that NFL football fancies itself more important than the other events? Or is it that football most resembles the gladiator matches in ancient Rome? I just don't get this difference! Ideas, anyone?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
They use Roman numerals to identify the "anniversary" of the Super Bowl (eg. the 43rd Superbowl is labeled Super Bowl XLIII) If they used a single year, not only would it be confusing since the Super bowl starts in one year and ends in another. Also, if they put Super Bowl 43 instead of XLIII, people may mistaken "43" for the year 1943.
Post a Comment