Silly season
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The silly season is the period lasting for a few months (starting in mid to late summer in the Northern Hemisphere) in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. This term was known by the end of the 19th century and listed in the second edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and remains in use at the start of the 21st century. The fifteenth edition of Brewer's expands on the second, defining the silly season as "the part of the year when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting (about August and September)". In Australia and New Zealand, the silly season has come to refer to the Christmas/New Year festive period, which are in the Southern Hemisphere summer.
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[edit] Motivation
Typically, the latter half of the summer is slow in terms of newsworthy events. Newspapers as their primary means of income rely on advertisements, which rely on readers seeing them, but historically newspaper readership drops off during this time when, for instance, in the U.K., Parliament takes its summer recess, so that parliamentary debates and Prime Minister's Questions, which generate much news footage, do not happen. Similar recesses are typical of legislative bodies elsewhere, and there is also a decline of other news because vacations are common during that period. To retain (and attract) subscribers, newspapers would print attention-grabbing headlines and articles to boost sales, often to do with minor moral panics or child abductions.
[edit] Other names
Other countries have comparable periods, for example the Sommerloch (summer [news]hole) in Germany; French has la morte-saison ("the dead season" or "the dull season"), and Swedish has nyhetstorka ("news drought"). A silly season news item is called rötmånadshistoria in Sweden and Mätäkuun juttu in Finland, both literally meaning "rotting-month story".
In many languages, the name for the silly season references cucumbers (or more precisely gherkins): Komkommertijd in Dutch, Norwegian Agurktid, Polish Sezon ogórkowy, Hungarian Uborkaszezon and Hebrew עונת המלפפונים (Onat Ha'melafefonim) all mean "cucumber time" or "cucumber season". The corresponding German term is Sauregurkenzeit ("pickled cucumber season").
The expression of "cucumber time" is actually derived from an old English expression from the 18th century[citation needed] which, while no longer used in Britain, is still used in many other countries.
[edit] Side-effects
A side-effect of stirring up the public in this manner comes when an authentic story is dismissed as a prank, or when a superfluous story is taken as legitimate (cf: The Sun, The National Enquirer etc).
[edit] Sport
It also refers to off-seasons in sports, such as football, professional ice hockey, Formula One, NBA, or NFL - where due to lack of action on field/track, speculations are instead made on possible team changes and debuts of any star involved in the sport. However, it is used as a year-round phrase in NASCAR, as changes occur on a full-time basis and there is no so-called off-season.
[edit] References
- Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 15th edition, 1996 published by Cassell.
- Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 2nd edition, 1898, online: definition for silly season
[edit] External links
- Let's hear it for the silly season — BBC News article
