'A paradox, a paradox, WTF's a paradox?'

I remember finding out about the Leap Day birthday thing during a child friendly performance of The Pirates of Penzance. I think Jon English might have been the Pirate King.

The Pirates of Penzance

It was horrifying. Finding out that for a class of children, they only got a birthday every four years, like the Olympics. The reveal happened in a song called ‘A Paradox’ and I remember whispering to a parent to have it all explained. “He hasn’t had ‘21 birthdays’ because he was born on a Leap Day, February 29th in a leap year, so has only been alive for five birthdays”. They had to get the wording right, did Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘by his 21st birthday’, not, ‘at 21 years of age’. Luckily they were good at words.

This won’t be the 1981 production that revealed hard Leap Day truths to me, but you’ll get the idea. Jon English is in servitude to a theatre company that won’t release him from the role of Pirate King until his 133rd birthday.

I didn’t know what a paradox was, and I only associate the word with a lack of birthdays.