Here we are at the end of July.
It's hot outside. Like, really hot. And, if you live where I do, you hear the season as much as you feel it. Mosquitoes, fireworks, kids at play. It can only mean one thing, summertime is here. God help us all.
Summer in Japan is a festive affair. There are festivals and fireworks displays everywhere and stores are full of summertime treats like shaved ice1, ice cream, and ice cold drinks. Weekends are spent in the pool or at the beach and the rest of the day is spent indoors under the a.c. as much as is possible. But because we're word nerds, all this revelry brings only one question to mind:
What's another word for summer?
It is surprisingly hard to find one. Summer, after all, is one of our most foundational words. Not only is it older than English itself, the word in some form or another goes all the way back to the very roots of the hodgepodge that would eventually become English. Per Etymonline:
"hot season of the year," Old English sumor "summer," from Proto-Germanic *sumra-...from PIE root *sm- "summer"
The authors then go on to note that this same Proto-Germanic word shows up in lots of "old" languages from Old Dutch to Old Saxon to Old Frisian while the PIE root extends to Sanskrit, Armenian, and Old Irish. That is a lot of work for word.
Normally, when we have a very old word, we end up with lots of sibling words; the word picks up meanings, and therefore synonyms, as it travels down the centuries. Not this time. No, summer is just summer.
Take a look at the synonyms on offer from Thesaurus.com:
summertime, vacation, heat, midsummer, daylight savings time, dog days, picnic days, riot time, summer solstice, summertide, sunny season
That's quite the collection and yet, I'd argue that aside from summertime and summertide2 none of them mean "hot season of the year" in quite the same way that summer does. I mean, vacation? That's a one-way synonym at best. Heat? C'mon. Daylight savings time, dog days, picnic days, riot days...those are all things that happen during summer but they're not actually the same as summer, right? For that matter, the solstice is specifical day and sunny season3...is that actually a phrase that people use?
But that leaves us with two, the aforementioned summertime and summertide4. But, as I mentioned, summer is an old word and, if it hasn't acquired tons of synonyms, it has acquired a few different uses. Seven of them, according to Merriam-Webster. Four as a noun, two as an adjective, and one as a verb5.
There are a few interesting points here, first that summer can be an equivalent for year as in "She's a child of just eight summers." Which sounds a little old-fashioned to me, but is still perfectly cromulent. Next is its use as a verb, as in "We like to summer in the mountains.6" And class-connotations aside, this is also perfectly understood.
Now, in both cases, there are alternative words that can stand in with the same meaning: year / season, vacation / holiday. But in both cases, the actual meaning of summer itself hasn't changed. In both cases, the listener understands that the speaker is referring to the passage of time as measured by how many hot seasons have passed by.
Which brings me back to my original question, what's another word for summer?
There isn't one, not really. No, summer is so foundational and so singular that our usual rule gets suspended. Some words become the pillars on which our language and our communal human experience are built. Mom, dad, sun, moon, winter, summer.
And now it's time for me to go enjoy mine. We'll be back next week with another issue and then...well, then we have something special planned for the rest of the summer. But we'll talk about it later, somewhere shady and cool. Until then, thanks for reading.
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What We’re Reading
All links to books discussed here go to A Very Learned Bookstore on Bookshop.org, meaning I'll get a small commission on any books purchased through these links.
The Art of Fielding
by Chad Harback
Summer means baseball games on t.v. every so often and the occasional foray back into the classics of baseball fiction. Most of these classics are movies: Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, Major League. But every so often a book slips in there. The Art of Fielding is one of those.
From the book’s description on Bookshop.org:
At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.
Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others.
I’ve read the novel a couple of times now, and like all the best stories, I keep finding new things to enjoy and admire. Give it a try.
The only flavor of shaved ice worth eating is Blue Hawaii and I will die on this hill.
I had to look this up. From Merriam-Webster: "summertime; Middle English sumertid, somertid, from sumer, somersummer + tid time"
Apparently it is, but just barely. "sunny season" scores a paltry 216 for frequency compared to "summer's" 2583716 on the 17 billion word NOW corpus.
The same corpus lists summertide a mere 25 times and every example it returns is a proper noun.
If it's both a transitive and intransitive verb, does that count as one or two? No, really, I'm asking?
Both sample sentences are my own, but they’re so generic I’m sure I’m copying somebody.