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Archive for 03/10/2008

What a colOrful blog!

Well done everyone, hopefully I can put me magnifying glass away now.

Re: the etymology of “indian summer” i thought i had better ‘google it’ as you lot seem as clueless as i am. It presents four possibilities and i thought it would be good to find out which YOU think is the most plausible.

(1) In The Americans, The Colonial Experience, Daniel J. Boorstin speculates that the term originated from raids on European colonies by Indian war parties; these raids usually ended in autumn, hence the extension to summer-like weather in the fall as an Indian summer. Two of the three other known uses of the term in the 18th century are from accounts kept by two army officers leading retaliation expeditions against Indians for raids on settlers in Ohio and Indiana in 1790, and Pennsylvania in 1794.

(2) It may be so named because this was the traditional period during which early North Americans First Nations/Native American harvested their crops.

(3) It could be so named because the phenomenon was more common in what were then North American Indian territories, as opposed to the Eastern Seaboard.

(4) It may be of Asian Indian origin rather than North American Indian. H. E. Ware, an English writer, noted that ships traversing the Indian Ocean loaded their cargo most often during the Indian summer, or fair weather season. Several ships actually had an “I.S.” on their hull at the load level thought safe during Indian summer. However this usage refers to the actual high summer in India, not to a late warm spell.

mmmmmmh! Watcha think then?

Andee XXX

PS. for Sue

Aha! Your ’secret ploy’ was unsucessful. Little did you know, that i knew, that you would devise a ’secret ploy’ that would attempt to draw attention to your post by making it small and colorless. This is why i previously decided to devise a ‘cunning plan’ to make you think that i was trying to shame you into making your post big and colourful, when really i had anticipated that ‘fly on the wall’ would itself post a post which would cunningly draw you into a situation where you would produce a big colourful post and so unwittingly you fulfilled my original intention!

Bye the way, do you remember this word - ‘paucity’ ?

PPS. If you want to use the equivalent of invisible ink to send a secret message try using color=”white”.

X(((Sue)))X. (three hugs and two kisses)

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