Literal Translation
(This will happen) the week of four Thursdays
Actual Meaning
This will never happen!
Etymology
This one was a rabbit hole!
The expression is more understandable by anyone who attended school between 1945 and 1972 and knew Thursday as a weekly day of rest or catechism (subsequently, the decree of 12 May 1972 moved this day to Wednesday). A week with four Thursdays (and one Sunday) was the stuff of dreams for all schoolchildren in France at the time.
However, it is not certain that school life is the origin of the expression, variants of which can be found very early on, for example in the work of the poet Guillaume Coquillart (1452-1510): ‘And first of all, that in the year Mil CCCCLXX, on the eve of Saint John’s Day, in the week with two Thursdays […]’ (L’Enqueste d’entre la simple et la rusée, 1491.)
How should we understand this week with two Thursdays? A clue is provided in 1869 in L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux, which reveals the existence in Paris, at the end of the 17th century, in the Cordeliers convent, of a Latin epitaph that can be translated as follows: ‘Here lies Nicolas, youngest son of Jean de Saint Quirico [Saint Cyr], citizen of the city of Siena, who passed away in the year of Our Lord 1338, on a Sunday in the month of August with two Thursdays.’
An anecdote sheds light on this ‘August with two Thursdays’: Pope Benedict XII was due to make his official entry into Paris on a Thursday during the week of 29 August (the feast of St John the Baptist). Unfortunately, it rained so heavily on that Thursday that the ceremony had to be postponed until the following day. As Friday was a day of religious fasting, Benedict XII gave special permission to eat meat so that the celebrations could be enjoyed to the full, and the day was named ‘second Thursday’.
From two to three, then four… According to Guillaume Coquillart’s L’Enqueste, this week was still known in 1470 as the week of two Thursdays. In 1532, Rabelais refers to a week of three Thursdays. He describes it as famous and claims, in a manner as comical as it is vague, that it can be explained by leap year irregularities.
These Thursdays became four in the 19th century, with the expression appearing in Alfred Delvau’s Dictionnaire de la langue verte in 1866 with this amusing definition: “Week of four Thursdays: a fantastic week in which bad debtors promise to pay their debts, flirtatious women promise to be faithful, stingy people promise to be generous, etc. […]. In the 17th century, it was also said: The week of four Thursdays, three days after never.” The matter is settled: the week of four Thursdays is either on Saint-Glinglin’s Day or on the Greek calends!