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This week: Solstice Thoughts Edited by: Waltz Invictus  
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The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.
-Gary Zukav
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus
Winter is nature's way of saying, 'Up yours.'
-Robert Byrne |
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16:28 Universal Coordinated Time, 21 December 2017.
In the Northern Hemisphere, this is the moment of winter solstice - literally, the moment the sun stands still.
It doesn't actually stand still, of course - not from our frame of reference. The Earth continues to rotate and the sun still appears to move across the sky (unless it's night, but you know what I mean), but it has appeared to be moving gradually more and more southward each day, until, on the solstice, it stops. Then it looks around, shrugs, says "screw it," and starts climbing back up the sky.
Our ancestors knew this. They knew it better than we do, disconnected as we are from many of the cycles of nature. We know it's cold, or it's warm; daytime or nighttime or the crepuscular in-between times (yes, I just wanted an excuse to use the word 'crepuscular'). But while science can tell us the mechanism for these things, for the most part we don't feel it viscerally, what with our heated and brightly lit abodes.
Not, you understand, that I advocate going out into nature. It's too bloody cold to do that.
Still, an understanding of these cycles, and the folklore surrounding them, is a good thing to have - for anyone, but especially if you like to, I don't know, write fantasy stories set in times and places where this folklore was a part of everyday life.
The Earth is generally round. It spins on an axis; the places where this axis intersects the surface are called the North Pole and the South Pole. It also moves in a path around the sun that is almost, but not quite, circular, meaning that at some points in its orbit, it is closer to the sun than at other points. The Earth's rotational axis is tilted with respect to this orbit, and this tilt is always in the same direction relative to the stars - not the sun. This means that about half the time, the North Pole is tilted generally toward the sun; the other half of the time, it's tilted generally away. When it's tilted toward the sun, the pole is in daylight; otherwise, it is in constant darkness. When it's tilted as far away from the sun as it ever gets, that's when we have Northern Hemisphere winter solstice.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why Santa Claus is said to be headquartered at the North Pole.
The Earth's orbital eccentricity - the variation of its orbit from that of a perfect circle - has very little effect on the seasons. In fact, the point at which the Earth is closest to the sun in its orbit occurs very close to the Northern Hemisphere winter solstice. Thus, seasonal variation is overwhelmingly determined by the relative position of the Earth's axis with respect to the sun. Lower sun means shorter daylight; shorter daylight plus lower sun angle means less solar radiation; less solar radiation means it gets freaking cold.
Or, as I like to put it, axial tilt is the reason for the season.
At temperate latitudes - most of the continental US, for example - weather tends to lag behind the solstice, which is why we generally get more snowstorms in January and February than in October or November. You can think of it as the region in question taking a while to warm up again from the lengthening days. Thus, "winter" is considered to be the time between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. This can be confusing, because in some cultures, the winter solstice is also called "midwinter," just as the summer solstice is called "midsummer." This is, primarily, a matter of regional perception of the typical weather for any given season.
I'm just going to throw one more bit of season-related folklore out there, because I don't want to spend the entire freaking winter correcting misconceptions:
Every season (equinox to solstice or solstice to equinox) generally contains three full moons. This was important to pre-industrial people, because they could do stuff by the light of the full moon (stuff besides turning into werewolves). So each moon got a name. These names varied from culture to culture; in the cultures that contributed most to the US, for the season of winter, these full moons were called, in order, the Wolf Moon, the Snow Moon, and the Worm Moon. You can find other names for them as well; the important point is that they did have names.
But sometimes, because the lunar and solar calendars don't line up, you get four full moons in a season. When that happens, the third full moon of that season is called a Blue Moon. Hence the expression, "once in a blue moon." A Blue Moon is not the second full moon of a given calendar month - this is a pernicious error that can't seem to go away. It's not the "modern definition," as I've seen in some reports; it's simply wrong.
And here's one reason why it has to be wrong: Next year, in 2018, there will be two full moons in January, and two in March. And none in February. "Once in a blue moon" loses all of its meaning and poetry if something happens twice in a three-month period.
Another reason is that our solar calendar is almost entirely disconnected from the natural cycles of sun, moon, and Earth; moreover, it's not the only one used in the world - but the natural, historical definition of "blue moon" works entirely independently of whatever calendar one is using. The idea of a "blue moon" as such probably came about even before the modern Gregorian calendar came into use.
I can deal with people using "decimate" to mean something other than "eliminate one-tenth of;" I can deal with people using "literally" to mean "figuratively;" I can even deal with "irregardless." Language changes over relatively short timelines. But the seasons, and the cycles of the moon? As far as we're concerned, they might as well be eternal.
They're not, but that's a story for another editorial. |
And now some fantasy for your winter enjoyment:
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Last time, in "The Lost Letter" , I talked about Þ.
DaveG  : There's also the German ß, which is still in use. And, yeah, it's sort of cheating to use other languages, although, otherwise, German uses the Latin alphabet, and quite a bit of English is derived from German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
English is considered to be part of the Germanic language group, though there has been so much cross-pollination from other languages that this is mostly academic. This is actually one of the language's great strengths - but, from what I've heard, it's also why it can be so difficult for a non-native speaker to learn.
Fyn-elf  : FANTASTC newsletter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But it gets me wondering if there was one for gh?
I do not think there was. I'm no expert, but I have heard that the "gh" consonant pair, at least as it's used in words like 'knight' and 'tight', used to be pronounced like a guttural 'k' - not quite as throaty as the Scottish/German/Hebrew "ch" sound, but moreso than the 'k' of 'kite'. So "knight" wasn't like "nite" but more like "k'nicht." Of course, now it could be pronounced like 'g' or 'f', or silent, among other possible pronunciations. Ain't English fun?
That'll do it for me for December. See you next year! Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: December 20, 2017 Issue [#8660]
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