"There was
the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of
face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible..."
When he was nine years old.
Well, what in Sam's hill are the others if nonage is nine? Octage? Septage? This is an odd word. I wish we had one huge page here that had a listing of all these number items within reason.
Dear WW: I can't remember now where I got the information
that "nonage" meant "ninth year". Webster 1913 doesn't support it:
Webster's 1913 Dictionary
Definition: \Non"age\, n. [LL. nonagium, from L. nonus ninth, novem
nine.] (Eccl.)
The ninth part of movable goods, formerly payable to the
clergy on the death of persons in their parishes. --Mozley &
W.
\Non"age\, n. [Pref. non- + age.]
Time of life before a person becomes of age; legal
immaturity; minority.
The human mind . . . was still in its nonage.
--Coleridge
And that use of nonage somehow rings a more familiar bell, Bill.
Nonage reminds me of the Latin for weekend (not really, but the closest the Old Romans had for our concept): nundinae. Roman weeks where 9 days long. (If you're using a lunar calendar, you can divy the month up by four seven day weeks or three nine day weeks. It's complicated, usually by the fact that folks usually have a solar year to content with.) Anyway, the Romans divided up a month into Kalends (the first of the month), the Nones (the 5th or 7th of a month, but connected to nonus '9th'), and the Ides (the 13th or 15th, probably having to do with the fullmoon). It's all really complicated and obscure, and the Romans didn't even have names for the days of the week, they just used A through H, which gives us 8 days. 7, 8, 9? We get the seven day week from the Babylonians who divided the circle and the year into 360 degrees / days. They used a base-60 numbering system, sexagesimal, like the Maya. In keeping with ordinal numbers it should be octavage and septimage, but neither of these words occur. Nine was special, perhaps because it's the last digit in the decimal numbering system.