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

On 29 Dec 2004, at 1.02 am, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> 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.
That ordering sounds broken, but I suspected as much. Thanks.

> 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.
Probably makes most sense, ten points to the Swedes :) Autumn hardly
makes sense here anyway, all native plants are evergreen (or
mostlygreygreenbutsometimesblack as the case may be). (We don't say '1
September is when spring starts', just that spring is Sept, Oct and
Nov, but it's assumed and accepted that the start is indeed the first.)

> 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?
None that I know of, but most winds you could practically lean against
I've experienced is a hot northerly, and you're wanting to take clothes
off anyway! (Cold strong winds do of course exist, and are probably
stronger than hot strong winds, but they are mostly at night, when
you're protected by your walls and doona (duvet, I think, is the
standard word, but I make no promises).)

But your saying reminds me of one we have in Australia---'I hate the
heat, at least you can put on extra layers when it's cold, but there's
only so many clothes you can take off!' (it doesn't rhyme, even in
Australia, and I'm not sure if that 'we' was royal or not...).

On the other hand, there's times when I've put on more clothes to cool
down in summer. Often the heat you don't get from not being in direct
sunlight is more than the heat you retain from the layer, at least
temporarily. It works very well with school uniform blazers because the
inner lining stays cool, but they're too heavy to work well for long.
Of course, that totally leaves the issue of sunburn (and the protective
quality some clothes have) behind.

--
Tristan.

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