Some all-time metaphors  from ‘season’

As the Nation remarked, “the rainy season is with us again.” What is a season? My dictionary defines it as “…one of the four equal periods into which the year is divided by the equinoxes and solstices…” It names them as spring, summer, autumn and winter. Shakespeare expresses this same Eurocentric prejudice:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date

…But thy eternal summer shall not fade…

But, of course, we have to exonerate Shakespeare because he had no idea that his writing would, one day, be made compulsory text in equatorial high schools, where his metaphors, though lovely and powerful, are inappropriate and cannot create any ripples in the lake of emotion.

For, certainly, East Africa’s year is not divisible into such seasons. At Kikuyu – where a master of the English language called Joe Kariuki introduced us to that poem in Form One – “summer” never fades. Nay, “eternal spring” is its real name. There, “the buds of May” remain “darling” the year round.

Nevertheless, Kenya has seasons. We have, for instance, a “rainy season” and a “dry season”. And, like everybody else’s, our seasons are governed by “heavenly” phenomena. But the thing about seasons is that they encourage or discourage certain activities.

In the Northern winter, for instance, people go a-skiing and some animals hibernate. In, autumn, some (“deciduous”) trees shed all their leaves (which is why North Americans know their autumn as “fall”).

To hibernate is to “sleep in winter”. It is to pass that whole season in a completely dormant condition in which almost all metabolic activities cease.

The word is derived from the Latin hibernus (“winter”) and hibernare (“to brave the winter”). This is probably why Rome knew Ireland as Hibernia. The French Hiver has the same root. In the Northern spring, life buds again and, in summer, it bursts into full bloom.

The English folk have a charming song for it: “Somer is icumen in/Ludde singe cucu

Groweth sede and bloweth mede

And springeth wudde nu…”

This original (13th century) version is what is in the traditional collections of English verse. Mercifully, we were taught a more civilised version of it:

Summer is a-coming in

Loudly sing cuckoo

Groweth seed and bloweth mead

And springeth wood anew…

It is as irrelevant as Shakespeare’s “buds of May”. But we learn this: Really and truly, the English language has come a long way!

We learn something else. It is to this “seasonality” of activities that we owe such metaphors as “the sowing season”, “the harvesting season”, “the mating season”, “the mango season”, “the soccer season”, “the election season” and “the drama season”.

But, if so, what did the Nation reporter mean when he wrote that “Musa Otieno is a seasoned player”? What is a “man for all seasons”? What is an “open season”? The word has spawned many such idiomatic expressions. Let us discuss some of them later.

Mr Ochieng is a veteran journalist