Leap day is oddly obscure

You only have to be as smart as a fifth-grader to know that leap year comes with an extra day tacked on the end of February. But that one stray day every four years is as quirky for the things it is as for the things it isn't.

It is arguably the most unusual day of the year, and yet banks are open and postal workers are posting, which means it is no holiday. Searching "leap day" on Wikipedia returns nothing, though it is mentioned within the "leap year" entry. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary doesn't even have a listing for the day, and perhaps the most shocking thing of all: a conspicuous absence of greeting cards.

A search of the whole of Utah law finds not a single reference to the word "leap," leaving nit-picky questions about the legalities of things that did happen or should happen on a particular day when that day doesn't come around every year.

Thom Roberts, a lawyer with the Utah Attorney General's Office, said he is not aware of any leap-day legal gotchas. "I've called around to a couple of people I thought might have dealt with the issue and none of them have," he said.

Common law dictates a person advances in age the day before their birthday, "though most states have shifted over to the birthday rule, which dictates a person advances in age on the birthday itself," Roberts said.

Jill Laws, deputy director of the Utah Driver License Division, said the question of whether a person with a leap-day birthday would legally be old enough for a driver's license on the last day of February in a non-leap-year year has never come to her attention. Perhaps that's because Utahns born on leap day, and eligible for their first driver's license at age 16, will always have that 16th birthday during a leap year when there is a February 29th on the calendar.

Because leap day is infamous as a birthday it's likely to be a lively topic in hospitals' labor and delivery areas Friday. Kathleen Murphy, director of St. Mark's Hospital's marketing and communication, said babies born there on Friday will go home with frog-themed bath towels and a bib with a frog on it as a remembrance of their leap day birth. Aside from being a leaping critter, the frog is this year's leap day mascot in an awareness campaign about disease and other environmental perils threatening amphibians.