Dog days

The expression "dog days" refers to the hot, sultry days of summer, originally in areas around the Mediterranean Sea, and as the expression fit, to other areas, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.

The coincidence of very warm temperatures in the early civilizations in North Africa and the Near East with the rising, at sunrise (i.e., the heliacal rising), of Orion's dog, the dog star Sirius, led to the association of this phrase with these conditions, an association that traces to the Egyptians and appears in the ancient written poetic and other records of the Greeks (e.g., Hesiod, Aratus, and Homer in The Iliad) and the later Romans.

The expression is used in prose literature, poetry, and song and album titles.

General description

The dog days are the hottest, most uncomfortable part of the Northern summer.^{[lower-alpha 1][1]} Additionally, they also refer to promotions created by American baseball ballparks to boost ticket sales during mid-afternoon games. The American weather and farming annual, The Old Farmer's Almanac, explains that "[t]he phrase 'Dog Days' conjures up the hottest, most sultry days of summer," coinciding with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the dog star, in the constellation Canis Major.^{[lower-alpha 2][2][3]:19} While the correlation between the hottest and most humid weather of the year with this specific calendar period has not survived the broadening of weather understanding and communications to global, the correlation of the rising of Sirius with extreme heat has been sufficient in enough climes in the Northern Hemisphere such that the association of dog days "with hot, sultry weather was made for all time."^[2]

Origin of name

Jay Holberg observes that the Greek poets Hesiod (ca. 750-650 BCE) and Aratus (ca. 310–240 BCE) refer in their writings to "the heat of late summer that the Greeks believed was actually brought on by the appearance of Sirius," a star in the constellation that the later Romans and we today refer to as Canis Major, literally the "greater dog" constellation.^[3]:15f He notes,

The Greeks possessed an elaborate lore associated with Sirius… [Its] first appearance… in the morning skies during the final days of July and early August indicated the arrival of the sweltering heat of late summer… [and was] associated with heat, fire, and even fevers.^[3]:16

Homer, in the Iliad, references the association of "Orion's dog" (Sirius) with oncoming heat, fevers and evil, in describing the approach of Achilles toward Troy:

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.^[1]

1. ^ Homer (1997) [c 8th c. BCE]. The Iliad. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Hackett. ISBN 9780872203525.  22:33–37.

Alternatively, this is rendered:

like to the star that cometh forth at harvest-time,
and brightly do his rays shine amid the host of stars in the darkness of night,
the star that men call by name the Dog of Orion. Brightest of all is he,
yet withal is he a sign of evil, and bringeth much fever upon wretched mortals.^[1]

1. ^ Homer (1924) [c 8th c. BCE]. The Iliad. Trans. A.T. Murray. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, USA. Retrieved 28 July 20152 vols. Also published London, LND, GBR:William Heinemann. 

Span of the days

In Anglo-Saxon times, the Dog Days ran from 14 July ("Dies caniculares incipiuntur"^{[lower-alpha 3]}) to 5 September ("Dies caniculares finiuntur"^{[lower-alpha 4]}).^[4]

The Old Farmer's Almanac lists the traditional period of the Dog Days as the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. These are the days of the year with the least rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere.^[2]

The Book of Common Prayer of 1559 states "Dog Days beg." on July 6 and "Dog days end*" on August 16 (in the Gregorian calendar), though the latter is marked "* Apparently an error".^[5]

Associations

The dog days continued through the early 19th century to be perceived as foreboding a time of evil, wherein "the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies," as described by Brady in his Clavis Calendaria (1813).^[6]

In recent years, the "dog days" and "dog days of summer" have taken on new connotations. In business, where "July is typically one of the quietest months of the year for stock trading," the traditional meanings of heat and disease have been extended to business inactivity, through expressions like "dog days of summer for stock trading."^[7]

The term periodically makes its way into various appellations, for instance of the Danish adventurer Jørgen Jürgensen, who is referred to by Icelanders as "Jörundur hundadagakonungur" ("Jørgen the Dog-Days King"), since he proclaimed himself their lord protector for some months in 1809.^[8]

Though it is as yet uncited or further substantiated, a pair of primary sources from a Finnish medical institution report that these warmest summer days are associated with increased risk of deep surgery wound or organ infection.^[9][10]

Popular references

Allusions to dog days appear in serious non-fiction work. In an early 20th century historical tome on the religious life of Rome, J. B. Carter writes of "the oppression of the dog-days,—that peculiarly discouraging heat, which only a Roman summer day brings forth."^[11]

In literature, mentions of dog days include John Webster's 1613 stage play, The Duchess of Malfi, where Bosola states "blackbirds fatten best in hard weather: why not I in these dog days?".^[12]

The expression is vividly employed by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843):

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! … The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait… A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.^[13][14]

Richard Adams also uses it to describe the English summer in Watership Down:

Now came the dog days - day after day of hot, still summer, when for hours at a time light seemed the only thing that moved; the sky-sun, clouds and breeze-awake above the drowsing downs.^[15]

In the short story "The Bar Sinister" (1903) by Richard Harding Davis, the main character, a street dog, suggests that "when the hot days come... they might remember that those are the dog days, and leave a little water outside… like they do for the horses."^[16] The prologue of the children's novel Tuck Everlasting (1975), set in a first week of August, speaks of "strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after."^[17]

The phrase appears in modern poetry, as in the opening of the 1909 poem "Queens" by J. M. Synge: "Seven dog-days we let pass / Naming Queens in Glenmacnass…".^[18]

The expression has found its way into film and popular music, for instance, in the titles of Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon,^[19] of Ulrich Seidl's 2001 film Hundstage (Dog Days),^[20] both for their seasonal settings, and in the 2012 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, about the activities of a teenage boy during summer holiday.^[21] Musical examples include the song title "Dog Days Are Over" from the debut album Lungs (2009) of the British band Florence and the Machine.^[22] Dutch goth-rockers Within Temptation feature a song called Dog Days on their album Hydra from 2013. Fear factory also covered Head of David's Dog Day Sunrise on their 1995 Demaufacture.

See also

Look up dog days in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Star lore

Notes

References