The dismal days

If by some bizarre circumstance you were thinking of going in for some bloodletting tomorrow, you might want to hold off, because November 17^th was, according to some medieval writers, one of the “dies mali” (“bad days” in Latin), two days every month particularly unsuited for this medical intervention. In English, these 24 unlucky days were called collectively “the dismal”, but by the 1400s, people started to call them, with unwitting redundancy, “the dismal days”, and thus “dismal” became an adjective meaning first “unlucky”, but eventually “gloomy and depressing”, a good description for most November days.