Tuesday

Tuesday is the second day of the ISO week, the one that does most of the work Monday gets blamed for. It is named after a war god with one hand.

The Old English Tīwesdæg honored Tiw, known in Norse myth as Týr. In the best known story he put his right hand in the mouth of the giant wolf Fenrir as a pledge while the other gods tied the animal up; the wolf realized it was a trick and bit the hand off. The Romans had given the same day to their own war god, Mars, which is where French mardi, Italian martedì and Spanish martes come from. Greeks and Spanish speakers are wary of it: Constantinople fell on Tuesday, 29 May 1453, and in both cultures Tuesday the 13th, not Friday, is the unlucky date. A Spanish proverb warns against getting married or setting sail on a martes.

American politics runs on Tuesdays. A law of 1845 put the presidential election on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, a choice usually explained by farm life: voters needed Monday to ride to the county seat without breaking the Sabbath, and Wednesday was market day. Super Tuesday, when many states hold primaries at once, got its name in the 1980s. Wall Street has a darker Tuesday on file, 29 October 1929, when the crash known as Black Tuesday wiped out fortunes in a single session.

Then there is the cheerful one. Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent, is Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday") in New Orleans and Pancake Day in Britain, where people used up eggs and butter before the fast. In Olney, Buckinghamshire, women have run a pancake race through the streets, frying pan in hand, in a tradition the town dates to 1445.