In the United Kingdom and in some other places, the silly season is the period lasting for a few summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. It is known in many languages as the cucumber time. The term is first attested in 1861, was listed in the second edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and remains in use at the start of the 21st century. The fifteenth edition of Brewer's expands on the second, defining the silly season as "the part of the year when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting ". In North America the period is often referred to prosaically as the slow news season, or less commonly with the phrase dog days of summer. In Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the silly season has come to refer to the Christmas/New Year festive period on account of the higher than usual number of social engagements where the consumption of alcohol is typical. The term is also used in sports, to describe periods outside traditional competitive sporting seasons.
Origin
The first attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary is an article titled "The Silly Season" in the Saturday Review edition of 13 July 1861. The article is specifically about an alleged reduction in the quality of the editorial content of The Times newspaper:
Motivation
Typically, the latter half of the summer is slow in terms of newsworthy events. Newspapers as their primary means of income rely on advertisements, which rely on readers seeing them, but historically newspaper readership drops off during this time. In the United Kingdom, Parliament takes its summer recess, so that parliamentary debates and Prime Minister's Questions, which generate much news coverage, do not happen. This period is also a summer school holiday, when many families with children choose to take holidays, and there is accordingly often a decline of business news, as many employers reduce their activity. Similar recesses are typical of legislative bodies elsewhere. To retain subscribers, newspapers would print attention-grabbing headlines and articles to boost sales, often to do with minor moral panics or child abductions. For example, the extensive British press coverage devoted to Operation Irma, a humanitarian airlift during the Siege of Sarajevo, was criticised as a "silly season" tactic.
Other names
Other countries have comparable periods, for example the Sommerloch in German-speaking Europe; French has la morte-saison or "la saison des marronniers", and Swedish has nyhetstorka. In many languages, the name for the silly season references cucumbers. Komkommertijd in Dutch, Danish agurketid, Icelandic gúrkutíð, Norwegian agurktid , Czech okurková sezóna, Slovak uhorková sezóna, Polish Sezon ogórkowy, Hungarian uborkaszezon, and Hebrew עונת המלפפונים all mean "cucumber time" or "cucumber season". The corresponding term in German is Sauregurkenzeit and in Estonian hapukurgihooaeg ; the same term is also used in Croatian as sezona kiselih krastavaca and in Slovene as čas kislih kumaric. The term "cucumber time" was also used in England in the 1800s to denote the slow season for tailors. A silly season news item is called rötmånadshistoria in Sweden and mätäkuun juttu in Finland, both literally meaning "rotting-month story". In Spain the term serpiente de verano is often used, not for the season, but for the news items. The term is a reference to the Loch Ness Monster and similar creatures, who are reputed to get more headlines in summer.
Side effects
A side effect of stirring up the public in this manner comes when an authentic story is dismissed as a prank, or when a superfluous story is taken as legitimate. A 1950 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth, titled "The Silly Season", makes use of this concept by having invading aliens stage one strange but harmless event after another. All are duly reported by the newspapers until the public is bored with them, and when a final "strange event" occurs, no one is prepared to accept it as an invasion until it is too late. The story was included in the 1952 anthology Tomorrow, the Stars, edited by Robert A. Heinlein.
Sports
Silly Season also refers to time periods outside traditional season-long competitive sporting competitions. In team sports such as association football and professional ice hockey, and leagues such as Formula One, NASCAR, the NBA, or the NFL, the final weeks of the season leading into off-time between one season and the next is filled with speculation regarding possible changes involving players, staff, and teams. Regardless of whether the speculation remains just that or indeed bears fruit, the moves and the discussions they generate help build interest in the leagues, their teams, and their upcoming seasons. Silly season is also used in professional golf to describe tournaments that are not official PGA Tour or LPGA Tour events. Normally scheduled at or near the end of the calendar year, when PGA and LPGA tournaments are not usually scheduled, these events also employ formats of play not normally seen on those tours. The Shark Shootout and the Skins Game are two such examples of silly season events.
US Politics
In US politics and lifestyle, the silly season is a period from early summer until the first week of October of election years. Primary elections are over at this time, but formal debates have not started and the general election is still many weeks away. Issues raised during this period are likely to be forgotten by the election, so candidates may rely on frivolous political posturing and hyperbole to get media attention and raise money.
