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Can we please retire this "sweet summer child" thing? It is annoying af, rude, and likely never written by anyone over 30.
by jacobsenscott 4y ago
Can we please retire this "sweet summer child" thing? It is annoying af, rude, and likely never written by anyone over 30.
- slackfan 4y ago
- nfgivivu 4y ago
- sammalloy 4y ago
- propagandist 4y agoThat makes me hate the phrase even more.
- vector_spaces 4y agoI might be wrong but I think people were saying this long before GOT?
- sammalloy 4y agoI doubt it. It’s a direct reference to the book. To be a sweet summer child in the book is to be naive about the winter that is eventually coming, since you’re too young to have ever lived through a winter before, and therefore have no idea or conception or experience of what the real world is actually like. For those who don’t know, summers and winters are exceptionally long in the fantasy world of Westeros, and if you were born at the beginning of summer, you could reach the age of 10 before ever knowing a winter.
- nullwarp 4y agoI've lived in the south my whole life and have heard the phrase long before game of thrones...
- sammalloy 4y agoAre you 26? The book was published in 1996. It could very well be an already existing expression, but I had never heard it before the book.
- bobkazamakis 4y agotell me you're a sheltered teenager without telling me
- _mxrx 4y agoThis is a very common southern saying. The saying existed in The West Wind by James Staunton Babcock in 1849. It likely existed before that.
- sammalloy 4y agoThanks for the correction. I’m from California and never heard it before. Do you think the author of GOT was paying homage to the Southern usage for a reason?
- wastedimage 4y agoIt's just a fun way of saying naive.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jacobsenscott 4y agoIt dates from the 1800s (and should have stayed there), but the show re-popularized it. https://www.yourdictionary.com/sweet-summer-child https://www.yourdictionary.com/sweet-summer-child
- 6figurelenins 4y agoI assure you it predates GoT. https://www.quora.com/Who-started-the-phrase-you-sweet-summer-child-to-refer-to-a-naive-person-Was-it-from-a-movie-I-missed-And-more-important-do-you-think-it-will-run-its-course-or-will-it-become-embedded-in-American-discourse-like?top_ans=183437108 https://www.quora.com/Who-started-the-phrase-you-sweet-summe... It's just art imitating life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Winter_Night https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Winter_Night
- astura 4y agoDude, you kidding me? It was a saying long before the books existed. The saying is almost certainly older than George R. R. Martin himself.
- nullc 4y agoBetter than it being a Glory Season (1990) reference.
- swilliamsio 4y agoBless your heart.
- benatkin 4y agoMy brother in Christ.
- Apocryphon 4y agoSo say we all.
- bochoh 4y agoUnder his eye
- maerF0x0 4y ago> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Attacking the phrasing is not what we're looking for here at HN. The meaning of their comment is clear.
- humanrebar 4y agoI found the sweet summer child thing to be snarky as well for what it's worth.
- bradknowles 4y agoSo far as I know, it's also not common amongst those of us who are over 50.
- oblio 4y ago> and likely never written by anyone over 30. Well, George RR Martin would be super happy to know he's under 30 :-) For what it's worth, I'm not under 30 either. It's light-hearted and slightly irreverent. Whimsical, one might say.
- smoldesu 4y agoOnce you turn 30, the only thing you tell engineers is "winter is coming"
- Apocryphon 4y agoThis is the way.
- Izkata 4y ago> and likely never written by anyone over 30. As someone in my 30s, I've always thought of it as an "old-timey/old person phrase", same as sibling comment's "bless your heart".
- benatkin 4y agoIt's a new expression to me (in regular use, I had heard it before but not often) but it also works fine. I disagree that we need to get rid of it just because it's old fashioned.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bfung 4y ago
- tptacek 4y agoYou're right, and this is in the guidelines. Swipes like these (even if they feel jovial by the writers) sap credibility from posts and civility from the threads.
- tedunangst 4y agoDo the guidelines not also say something about ignoring such immaterial swipes and focusing on the matter at hand?
- tptacek 4y agoSure. If there wasn't already a sprawl from this, I'd have kept quiet. But like, the "summer child" thing really is super annoying, and the parent commenter is mostly right, if off-topic.
- tedunangst 4y agoI'm only here because we're all here. But summer child seems like the most prosaic insult possible, if one can even call it that, and it serves as a sort of useful shorthand. With a certainty approaching 99%, I think there is something better to be annoyed at.
- tptacek 4y agoI don't think it's super insulting or anything, it's just a condescending swipe. When you take a condescending swipe, you set a ceiling on the tone for everything that follows.
- Apocryphon 4y agoIt’s not so much an insult as a dumb overused meme popularized from a show that ended years ago in ignominy. It is known.
- caeril 4y agoIt's a very apt phrase. Young people whose only experience of professional life has been in the "summer", e.g. the good times, and have no conception of what it's like to find employment in the proverbial winter. ZIRP has created an entire generation with absolutely no clue about the very existence of, let alone the harshness of, cycles.