Word Junkie: The summer edition

Summer is the season that needs no defense and gets one anyway. Everyone claims to love it, nobody agrees on it, and half the words we use for it secretly mean “to die.” Which is fitting, because by August we’re ready to do so.

Summer, the plain one

Summer is refreshingly boring. Old English sumor, from an ancient root that shows up all over the northern languages meaning, roughly, “summer” or “season.” No goddess, no Latin committee, no drama. Spring got named after leaping metal coils; autumn can’t even decide if it’s fall or autumn or harvest. Summer just showed up, said sumor, and has coasted on that ever since. The most confident season and the least interesting name.

Solstice, the day the sun stood still

The summer solstice is Latin solstitium — sol, the sun, plus sistere, to stand still. For a few days around June 21, the noon sun climbs to almost exactly the same height, and its northward march appears to pause before turning back. The sun stands still. The Romans watched this with the naked eye, named it accurately, and moved on. We have satellites and still call it “the longest day.”

Estival, and the animals that nap through July

Here’s the summer twin of “vernal.” Estival (or aestival) comes from Latin aestas, summer — the fancy word for anything summery, used mostly by people who also say “vernal” and mean it. Its better half is estivation: summer dormancy. Some animals hibernate through the cold; others estivate through the heat — snails, lungfish, certain frogs that burrow into the mud and wait out the worst of it in a coma. If you have ever lain motionless on a hardwood floor in front of a fan in late July, congratulations. You were estivating.

The dog days, brought to you by an actual dog

The dog days are not named for dogs lying around panting, though that’s a reasonable guess and a good look. They come from the Latin dies caniculares, the days of the Dog Star. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, sits in Canis Major, the Big Dog. In high summer it rises and sets close to the sun, and the Romans, doing cause and effect the Roman way, decided all that extra star was piling its heat onto the sun’s and cooking everybody. Canicula, “little dog,” is why the French call a heat wave a canicule. So the dog days are astrology’s fault, meteorologically speaking, and we’ve kept the name for two thousand years out of sheer affection.

Swelter and sultry, the words that mean “to die”

Buckle up. Swelter comes from the Old English sweltan, which meant, flatly, “to die.” Not “to be uncomfortable.” To perish. To swelter was to faint or die from heat, and the word has softened over the centuries into “it’s a bit warm out,” which is the single most English thing that has ever happened to a verb. Sultry is a cousin of the same dying-of-heat root. So the next time a weather anchor calls the evening “sultry,” understand that they are cheerfully describing a fatal condition.

Torrid, and the zone you probably live near

Torrid is Latin torridus, from torrere, to parch or scorch — the same root that eventually gives us “toast.” The old geographers split the globe into climate belts and named the hot middle one the Torrid Zone: everything between the tropics, presumed too scorched for comfortable life. “Torrid” then wandered off into romance novels, where it now describes affairs instead of latitudes, but the first meaning is drier and meaner. A torrid August afternoon is not passionate. It is toast. You are the bread.

Aphelion, or: the sun is not the problem

Here is the fact that ruins picnics. In early July, Earth reaches aphelion — from the Greek apo, away from, plus helios, the sun — the one point in our orbit where we sit farthest from the sun all year. We are as far from the sun as we ever get, and it is still summer, because the season runs on the tilt of the planet, not the distance to the fire. The heat is an angle, not a proximity. Tell that to the next person who swears the sun feels closer in July. It has never been farther. It just has better aim.

Zephyr and sirocco, the good wind and the bad

Not all summer air wants you dead. A zephyr is a soft, warm breeze, from Zephyros, the Greek god of the west wind — the gentlest of the four and the one you actually want on a porch in July. Its evil twin blows in from the other direction: the sirocco, a hot, dust-loaded wind that rolls off the Sahara and across the Mediterranean, its name traced to the Arabic sharq, “east.” One word for the wind that cools you, one for the wind that sandblasts you. Summer keeps both on staff.

Siesta, the sixth hour

The siesta is the most honest response to summer any culture has produced, and its name is a clock. It comes from the Latin sexta hora, the sixth hour — counting from dawn, that lands around midday, exactly when the heat makes work a bad idea. Spain did the math, closed the shutters and lay down. The whole institution of the afternoon nap is named for the specific hour it became too hot to argue with. This is not laziness. This is arithmetic.

Lido, from a beach in Venice

If you have ever swum at a “lido,” you borrowed a proper noun. Lido is Italian for shore or beach, from the Latin litus, and points specifically at the Lido di Venezia, the long sandbar island that shelters the Venetian lagoon. It got so tied up with fashionable seaside bathing that the word floated across Europe and came to mean any open-air public pool. So a municipal pool in a cold gray town is, etymologically, a beach in Venice.

Ferragosto, the emperor’s day off

The Italians also gave us Ferragosto, the mid-August holiday when the whole country closes and goes to the water. The name is Latin — Feriae Augusti, “the festivals of Augustus” — a rest period the emperor Augustus set up to follow the summer’s hard labor. Two thousand years later, the labor is optional but the rest is sacred, and if you try to buy anything in Italy on Aug. 15, you will meet a locked door and a note. The emperor said rest. Who are you to argue with the emperor?

Barbecue and popsicle, the American summer

Two of the most summery words in American English are both borrowed or invented by accident. Barbecue comes through the Spanish barbacoa, from a Taíno word for a wooden framework used to cook over a fire — a scrap of Caribbean vocabulary that colonized the American backyard so completely that people assume it is the sound a grill makes. And popsicle is a genuine accident: a young boy named Frank Epperson left a cup of soda powder and water outside overnight with the stirring stick still in it. It froze. Nearly two decades later he patented it and called it the Epsicle. His kids called it the Popsicle. The kids won, and the rest of us have been calling every frozen sugar-on-a-stick by a brand name ever since.

The bottom line, such as it is

Summer is the season we trust the most and understand the least. We name our nap after a clock and our heat wave after a dog. We call a deadly faintness “sultry” and a public pool a Venetian beach. We stand as far from the sun as the orbit allows and complain that it feels close. Every word for summer is either lying to us or quietly telling us we’re dying, and we say them all anyway, sitting in a lawn chair, holding a Popsicle that got its name because a kid forgot his drink on the porch.

So estivate this month with a clear conscience. The snails are doing it. An emperor commanded it. And somewhere overhead, a dog star you can’t even see is getting all the blame.

Word Junkie is a column for people who own too many dictionaries and are not sorry.