Dog days

Hi everyone,

If you expected this post to be about animals and dogs, I'm so sorry ! This post is about weather ! 

For the first time in years this summer is being really hot -as summers should be. However, at least for me, we are living one of the hottest summers ever. It is difficult to concentrate, write, think or sleep in this tremendously hot weather. It is precisely this that has inspired me to write this blog entry. In this blog entry I will be posting some of the most interesting expressions to refer to hot and sunny weather. Let's get started little by little:

The first expression would be 'it's warm'. We say this when it's hot but not too hot. Our closest translation from Spanish is 'cálido'. We take this adjective to refer to the expression ''global warming', you know, the current situation planet Earth is going through. The Earth's temperature is increasing dramatically and the Earth is 'heating up'!

Then we have the obvious expression 'it's hot and sunny' which refers to a general spring or summer day on average temperature.

Let's heat things up a little bit. When the temperatures start to rise we speak about a 'heatwave', this is a weather phenomenon consisting of the rise in temperatures lasting for several days. This phenomenon may produce a 'heat haze', an effect whereby the air will also be really hot such as the air in Madrid or Castilla La Mancha.

When the heat is impossible to bear and you sweat a lot, we have different expressions: we can talk about 'sultry days'  ('diás de bochorno), or we can use two adjectives to collocate with 'heat'. The first one is 'suffocating heat',  a heat that can get to suffocate you (calor asfixiante) and the second one is 'sweltering heat' (calor sofocante).

My favourite expression for extremely hot days is, however, the false-friend expression 'dog days'. In Spanish the expression 'días de perros' is often misused to refer to 'really cold days'. However, in English, it is exactly the opposite. An appropriate translation for this expression being 'días de canícula.' The expression that gives the title to this post, both in English and Spanish comes from the word 'dog' (or 'can' in Spanish). It is one of the hottest periods of all, its origin being in the Sirio star, the brightest star in the constellation called Canis Major. Isn't this interesting?

In case you don't feel like reading the whole post, I will summarize the expressions below with their translations:

• It's hot: hace calor
• It's sunny: hace sol
• It's warm: hace bueno (cálido)
• Global warming: Calentamiento global
• Heat: calor
• Heat up: calentar/recalentar
• Heatwave: ola de calor
• Heat haze: bruma de calor
• Sultry days: días de bochorno
• Suffocating heat: calor asfixiante
• Sweltering heat: calor sofocante
• Dog days: días de canícula

Are you suffocating right now with all this vocabulary ? Can you think of more interesting expressions ? Anyway, I promise I will soon be writing a post on more, you know, refreshing vocabulary. In the meantime, use these expressions to enrich your English and do not only limit yourselves to say: 'it's really hot.' 

I am finishing this post with a more optimistic idiom related to the sun: 'the sun always shines' which means that we have every reason to be optimistic. Who knows, maybe the rain, a less suffocating heat or a milder weather will soon arrive.