Monday

Monday is the first day of the working week in most of the world and, by a wide margin, the least loved of the seven. Its name points at the Moon.

Old English called it Mōnandæg, a straight copy of the Latin dies Lunae, and the Moon is still there in French lundi, Italian lunedì and Spanish lunes. The international date standard ISO 8601, published in 1988, makes Monday day 1 of the week, although plenty of calendars in the United States still open on Sunday. Latvian keeps it simple with pirmdiena, "first day". Russian is more honest: ponedelnik means roughly "the day after not working", since the old word nedelya once meant Sunday, the day of doing nothing.

The bad reputation is well documented. Garfield, the lasagna-eating cat Jim Davis started drawing in 1978, spent decades treating Monday as a personal enemy. The Mamas & the Papas took "Monday, Monday" to number one in the United States in 1966, and it is not a happy song. New Order called their 1983 dance track "Blue Monday", and in 2005 a British travel company went further and put out a press release naming the third Monday of January the most depressing day of the year, complete with a pseudo-scientific formula credited to psychologist Cliff Arnall. Scientists dismissed it, and the date stuck anyway, mostly in holiday adverts.

Shops found a use for it too. Cyber Monday, the online sale on the Monday after American Thanksgiving, was named by the retail group Shop.org in 2005. And Monday has one consolation prize that the rest of the working week envies: Easter Monday and Whit Monday are public holidays across much of Europe, which makes them the rare Mondays that nobody complains about.