Re: CHAT: Our opinions of what can be called 'winter' (was: OT: Merry Christmas!)

Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:

> But a question I want to ask... In Australia, if you list the seasons,
> you normally go Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring. Is this normal, or a
> southernhemispherism (where summer is the first season of the year, so
> it makes sense to start the list there).
As far as I'm concerned, it's Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, presumably for no
more profound reason than that the new year begins in early winter.

We don't give exact start and end dates to seasons here, but winter is roughly
late November to early March, spring onto later May, summer until early
September, and then autumn till mid November again. Yes, this means that summer
and winter are closer to four months each, while autumn and spring are not much
more than two months each. That's how I think of it anyway.

> (Incidentally, my Swedish boss reckons that winters in Australia are a
> lot worse than winters in Sweden. In Sweden, they know it gets cold,
> and so prepare for it by having such modern technologies as jackets and
> central heating and glögg, whereas in Melbourne, we forget about such
> things, believing Australia to be a hot place already, and freeze
> instead.)
I can believe that. I've never spent a winter in Spain, but various relatives
and friends that have agree you freeze alot more there than you do in Sweden;
Swedish houses are built to retain heat, Spanish ones to keep it away, and
often lack central heating.

Connecting back to Carsten's mail, going to school when it's -20 isn't much of a
problem if the weather's nice and you've got sensible clothes. What's not fun is
going to school when it's -10 and the snow is blowing horizontally into your
face, with an upwind visibility of a few meters. That's the sort of thing that
make me want to call down eternal damnation on my kindergarten teachers who'd
always say "there's no bad weather, just bad clothes" (it rhymes in Swedish);
just what clothes help against a wind you practically could lean against?

                                              Andreas

Reply