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

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.

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.

> 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.

Agree to disagree I think.

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.

Lolol. Imagine participating in an international forum and using subjective definitions and expecting discourse to not degenerate. Lolol.

Excuse me while I go enjoy this beautiful summer.

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.

> 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.

I believe they might have meant that it comes in October/November, not that it's gone by December. It stays "miserable" until spring, with January and February being the coldest and snowiest.

The point is that just freezing cold is not miserable. Autumn weather with days getting very noticeably shorter and it’s cold but not freezing and gray for weeks is quite depressing for many. In contrast, proper winter with snow and days getting longer feels much better even if you need warmer clothes and more heating. This year and next will be a bit different as everyone will be very conscious about gas prices, but purely from weather perspective early December is the worst.

> The point is that just freezing cold is not miserable

I think the fact that what is most "miserable" to people varies so much is why trying to use the names for seasons to apply to whichever weather you dislike the most is confusing. I prefer the cold to the heat, and I'm much more miserable in hot humid days due to sweating than I am in the cold when I can bundle up and feel mostly fine, but it would be absurd for me to refer to June through September as "winter" in the northern hemisphere based on this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> can't talk about [...] without personal interpretations

Congratulations, you've discovered a Truth.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

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.

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.

What do you consider a winter?

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.

> the common interpretation of winter which is December -> March in the Northern Hemisphere

As I hope you are learning, in very many places in the northern hemisphere, perhaps including most of Europe, that is not what people mean by 'winter'.

Well, most of Europe stopped having consistent snow, so we can't refer to it like that any more.

I remember when I was a kid come November there was frost on the ground and the soil would gradually freeze and harden, creating the type of environment needed for snow to persist.

Twenty years have passed and it's all gone now. We have droughts in the summer though, for which we're largely unprepared because water retention was never a concern before.

That's climate change for you I guess.