08 July 2008

TWTFSSM in the Count of Monte Cristo

This weekend while I was playing a game of Scrabble, there was a television on in the background, tuned to a classic movie station (TCM, I think) which was showing The Count of Monte Cristo (there are many versions; this was the 1934 version starring Robert Donat).

I happened to glance at the screen during the scene where Edmond Dantes has crawled from his cell in the Chateau D'If prison to the cell of the Abbe Faria. On the wall of this learned man's cell were chalked a variety of diagrams and teaching tools, including what I believe was a calendar. What puzzled me in the brief moment it was on the screen was that the days of the week were inscribed "T W T F S S M," as though the week "begins" on Tuesday and ends on Monday.

The Wiki entry on first day of the week discusses the use of Sunday vs. Monday, but doesn't mention Tuesday as a possibility, nor could I find such with a Google search. It's possible that I misremembered what I saw, but I doubt it, and now I'm wondering if there's an explanation; is it a real variation on displaying the week, an invention by Dumas for his monk, or an egregious error by the movie set creators?

Our library doesn't have that version of the movie, and I don't have the book here to check the text. Does anyone know, or have any suggestions?

1 comment:

  1. perhaps the poor old abbot started his prison days one tuesday

    ReplyDelete

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