Tuesday is named after Tyr, the Norse god of war. Wednesday is Odin. Thursday is Thor. We are, three days a week, being addressed by a Viking pantheon, and no one at my office has noticed.
The blame, per Kristin Heineman of Colorado State University, lands on the Babylonians in 2,300 BCE, who looked up, counted seven wandering lights, and decided that was the week now. Four thousand years later I'm still rearranging dentist appointments around their stargazing. The Sumerian Calendar Review Board, which I made up but which feels real at 4 a.m., estimates 71.3% of modern humans could not name a single visible planet without checking their phone.
Credit where it's due: Saturday held the line. Dies Saturni walked into English basically unedited while every other day got swapped out for a guy with a hammer. That's the only detail I respect here, and I respect it for maybe nine seconds before remembering Saturn is also the god of time, which is the thing actively killing us all on a schedule.
Friday is Venus. Venus became Frigg. Frigg became a casual-dress code. The Babylonians would be furious if they were not extremely dead, which, fair, same boat eventually.
The follow-up piece, when Mercury gets rebranded again, someone else can write.
Based on the original article "Names for days of the week come from the solar system".
