4 ms·

It's definitely not the easiest way to talk about it. I've used heating, in Europe, in late spring and in my cabin even in summer. Am I just living in a perpetu

It's definitely not the easiest way to talk about it. I've used heating, in Europe, in late spring and in my cabin even in summer. Am I just living in a perpetual winter?

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Just read "the cold time of year" when you see "winter" and you'll get past this.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  I'm not trying to 'get past this', I'm trying to express my disbelief at the fact that: A - Things have gotten to the point where we can't talk about a damn season without personal interpretations of it; B - This has seeped into Hacker News, a forum I thought was for more diligent folks.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    For a street artist, winter might mean when it's too dark to perform. For a farmer, it might mean when the animals need to be kept in a barn. And for a commodities trader, it means when demand for gas is high.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Language is fluid. And with climate change, traditional seasons aren't nearly as useful in discussion as they used to be. In my area of my country, our autumn used to be the time of big stable highs giving rise to clear days and frosts overnight. Great time of year to go hiking, minimal chance of intense rainfall or snowfall in the high country. Now the weather in autumn resembles that in spring - predominant north west winds that bring intense rainfall to the west, heavy snowfall on the tops, and hot dry days to the east. I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year. Lastly, from my limited experience of Germany, the most miserable weather tends to come late October - November. It's not technically winter, but it's a frigging cold and miserable time of year.
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      > And with climate change, traditional seasons aren't nearly as useful in discussion as they used to be. It's definitely a bit more useful than arbitrary subjective interpretations of said terms based on hyperlocal weather patterns. > I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year. I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter.
      - EdwardDiego 4y ago
        Agree to disagree I think.
      - dogcatter 4y ago
        Lolol, you're the best example I've seen of "hacker news guy meets ambiguities in real language usage, can't handle it". > I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter. Meet interpersonal linguistic negotiation. Since in most Northern places most people feel cold roughly between November and March, no your one personal experience doesn't matter. Just like 'tall' is a perfectly useful word, even though it doesn't have a precise meaning in terms of number of millimetres.
        ThalesX 4y ago
        dogcatter 4y ago
        The only reason discourse has degenerated is because you made it about the meanings of words. Everyone else on this thread is having a pretty productive conversation.
    - rocketbop 4y ago
      > Lastly, from my limited experience of Germany, the most miserable weather tends to come late October - November. For what it's worth, if anything, this is certainly not true. Generally January and February are the coldest months in Germany, and if by miserable you mean dark, grey or snowy, it's also January and February.
  - lucumo 4y ago
    You must be fun at parties. Things haven't "gotten" to this point. It has always been thus. Kindergarten definitions leave out many nuances. Definitions are nearly always dependent on context, are nearly always fuzzy around the edges, and are nearly always subject to usefulness. And then we aren't even discussing metaphors, hyperbole, pars pro toto, tota pro paribus, other kinds of metonymy, and more figures of speech. Context made it perfectly clear what was meant here. It's a far more useful usage than the kindergarten level definition where winter starts at the winter solstice and not a day sooner.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    I'm normally the pedantic one but I've observed and participated in casual usage of term winter over the last 40 years across 5 countries three languages plus dialects and two continents. This isn't new :) Very large number of people in large number of countries will consider e. G. November "winter". It's cold, it's dark, it's snowing - the informal but practical definitions of "winter". It's not a sign of linguistic or social apocalypse. It's just people communicating.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Update : I've talked to a few of my friends and one point they made was that winters arr not equal everywhere in the colloquial daily sense. It's quite normal and meaningful and easily interpreted to say that "winters are longer in Canada than in North Carolina". Or that Nova Scotia has longer autumn than Ontario. In other words there are places that may have a short winter (I.e. Short period of extreme cold and snow, with very dark nights etc) and places that have long winter. Not astronomically correct but semantically and practically useful.
  - ReptileMan 4y ago
    >Things have gotten to the point where we can't talk about a damn season without personal interpretations of it If by personal you mean around the 5-600 million people that will totally get the context of winter = heating season especially when we are discussing gas for heating.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    > can't talk about [...] without personal interpretations Congratulations, you've discovered a Truth. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
duckmysick 4y ago
Various places have a heating season (for example Heizperiode in Germany) which is a period where you're expected to have your heating turned on to maintain a certain indoor temperature. It could be regulated by the law or specified in a contract if you're renting. Different places have different definitions of it. Sometimes it's fixed, like from October 1 to April 30. Sometimes it uses an average indoor temperature over a few days. If there's a cold snap in mid May (Eisheilige), you still want your heating turned on, but generally it will fall outside of the heating season.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  I'm not surprised at the fact that different places in the world have different weather patterns and different approaches to heating, lol. I'm surprised at the fact that winter is such a debatable topic and people base it on how they dress, or whether their municipality is feeding them heating agent, or if they turn on their own heating agent. We can take every little coordinate point on the earth, its political structure, its energy-reliance structure, the will of its people, and plot what winter means to each and every one of us, but ultimately winter is winter; October is not winter, November is not winter, and a meter is not an inch.
  - duckmysick 4y ago
    What do you consider a winter?
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      I consider winter to be a magical time of the year when as a child I used to play in the snow, hear stories about horrible winters from my grand parents, and that as an adult I feel brings some difficulties to my life. When I read something like 'this Winter is warm with minimal gas burned so far', I refer back to the common interpretation of winter which is December -> March in the Northern Hemisphere, because otherwise I would have to start interpreting what the other three seasons mean also.
      - 4y ago

It's definitely not the easiest way to talk about it. I've used heating, in Europe, in late spring and in my cabin even in summer. Am I just living in a perpetual winter?

EdwardDiego 4y ago

Just read "the cold time of year" when you see "winter" and you'll get past this.

ThalesX 4y ago
I'm not trying to 'get past this', I'm trying to express my disbelief at the fact that: A - Things have gotten to the point where we can't talk about a damn season without personal interpretations of it; B - This has seeped into Hacker News, a forum I thought was for more diligent folks.
- lozenge 4y ago
  For a street artist, winter might mean when it's too dark to perform. For a farmer, it might mean when the animals need to be kept in a barn. And for a commodities trader, it means when demand for gas is high.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Language is fluid. And with climate change, traditional seasons aren't nearly as useful in discussion as they used to be. In my area of my country, our autumn used to be the time of big stable highs giving rise to clear days and frosts overnight. Great time of year to go hiking, minimal chance of intense rainfall or snowfall in the high country. Now the weather in autumn resembles that in spring - predominant north west winds that bring intense rainfall to the west, heavy snowfall on the tops, and hot dry days to the east. I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year. Lastly, from my limited experience of Germany, the most miserable weather tends to come late October - November. It's not technically winter, but it's a frigging cold and miserable time of year.
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    > And with climate change, traditional seasons aren't nearly as useful in discussion as they used to be. It's definitely a bit more useful than arbitrary subjective interpretations of said terms based on hyperlocal weather patterns. > I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year. I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      Agree to disagree I think.
    - dogcatter 4y ago
      Lolol, you're the best example I've seen of "hacker news guy meets ambiguities in real language usage, can't handle it". > I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter. Meet interpersonal linguistic negotiation. Since in most Northern places most people feel cold roughly between November and March, no your one personal experience doesn't matter. Just like 'tall' is a perfectly useful word, even though it doesn't have a precise meaning in terms of number of millimetres.
      - ThalesX 4y ago
        dogcatter 4y ago
        The only reason discourse has degenerated is because you made it about the meanings of words. Everyone else on this thread is having a pretty productive conversation.
  - rocketbop 4y ago
    > Lastly, from my limited experience of Germany, the most miserable weather tends to come late October - November. For what it's worth, if anything, this is certainly not true. Generally January and February are the coldest months in Germany, and if by miserable you mean dark, grey or snowy, it's also January and February.
- lucumo 4y ago
  You must be fun at parties. Things haven't "gotten" to this point. It has always been thus. Kindergarten definitions leave out many nuances. Definitions are nearly always dependent on context, are nearly always fuzzy around the edges, and are nearly always subject to usefulness. And then we aren't even discussing metaphors, hyperbole, pars pro toto, tota pro paribus, other kinds of metonymy, and more figures of speech. Context made it perfectly clear what was meant here. It's a far more useful usage than the kindergarten level definition where winter starts at the winter solstice and not a day sooner.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I'm normally the pedantic one but I've observed and participated in casual usage of term winter over the last 40 years across 5 countries three languages plus dialects and two continents. This isn't new :) Very large number of people in large number of countries will consider e. G. November "winter". It's cold, it's dark, it's snowing - the informal but practical definitions of "winter". It's not a sign of linguistic or social apocalypse. It's just people communicating.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Update : I've talked to a few of my friends and one point they made was that winters arr not equal everywhere in the colloquial daily sense. It's quite normal and meaningful and easily interpreted to say that "winters are longer in Canada than in North Carolina". Or that Nova Scotia has longer autumn than Ontario. In other words there are places that may have a short winter (I.e. Short period of extreme cold and snow, with very dark nights etc) and places that have long winter. Not astronomically correct but semantically and practically useful.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  >Things have gotten to the point where we can't talk about a damn season without personal interpretations of it If by personal you mean around the 5-600 million people that will totally get the context of winter = heating season especially when we are discussing gas for heating.
- hnfong 4y ago
  > can't talk about [...] without personal interpretations Congratulations, you've discovered a Truth. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

duckmysick 4y ago

Various places have a heating season (for example Heizperiode in Germany) which is a period where you're expected to have your heating turned on to maintain a certain indoor temperature. It could be regulated by the law or specified in a contract if you're renting. Different places have different definitions of it. Sometimes it's fixed, like from October 1 to April 30. Sometimes it uses an average indoor temperature over a few days. If there's a cold snap in mid May (Eisheilige), you still want your heating turned on, but generally it will fall outside of the heating season.

ThalesX 4y ago
I'm not surprised at the fact that different places in the world have different weather patterns and different approaches to heating, lol. I'm surprised at the fact that winter is such a debatable topic and people base it on how they dress, or whether their municipality is feeding them heating agent, or if they turn on their own heating agent. We can take every little coordinate point on the earth, its political structure, its energy-reliance structure, the will of its people, and plot what winter means to each and every one of us, but ultimately winter is winter; October is not winter, November is not winter, and a meter is not an inch.
- duckmysick 4y ago
  What do you consider a winter?
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    I consider winter to be a magical time of the year when as a child I used to play in the snow, hear stories about horrible winters from my grand parents, and that as an adult I feel brings some difficulties to my life. When I read something like 'this Winter is warm with minimal gas burned so far', I refer back to the common interpretation of winter which is December -> March in the Northern Hemisphere, because otherwise I would have to start interpreting what the other three seasons mean also.
    - 4y ago