Oh you sweet summer child.

Tell me you’re not a fan of GOT without telling me…

I might be wrong but I think people were saying this long before GOT?

I 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.

It dates from the 1800s (and should have stayed there), but the show re-popularized it. https://www.yourdictionary.com/sweet-summer-child

This is a very common southern saying. The saying existed in The West Wind by James Staunton Babcock in 1849. It likely existed before that.

"Sweet summer's child" also appears in the poem "The Creole" by Mary Scrimzeour Whitaker published in 1850.

Thanks 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?

It's just a fun way of saying naive.

I've lived in the south my whole life and have heard the phrase long before game of thrones...

Are 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.

tell me you're a sheltered teenager without telling me

I assure you it predates GoT.

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

Dude, you kidding me? It was a saying long before the books existed. The saying is almost certainly older than George R. R. Martin himself.

Better than it being a Glory Season (1990) reference.

That makes me hate the phrase even more.

Bless your heart.

My brother in Christ.

So say we all.

Under his eye

> 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

Attacking the phrasing is not what we're looking for here at HN. The meaning of their comment is clear.

I found the sweet summer child thing to be snarky as well for what it's worth.

So far as I know, it's also not common amongst those of us who are over 50.

> 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.

Once you turn 30, the only thing you tell engineers is "winter is coming"

This is the way.

> 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".

It'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.

Oh sweet summer child, can’t take a roastin’ on the internets =p

It’s ok, take my karma.

You'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.

Do the guidelines not also say something about ignoring such immaterial swipes and focusing on the matter at hand?

Sure. 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.

I'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.

I 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.

It’s not so much an insult as a dumb overused meme popularized from a show that ended years ago in ignominy. It is known.

It'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.