You sweet summer child

[thinkprint]

AIBU to feel absolutely fucking murderous when people say this?

But…
I mean, a simple basic google shows that it was in use way before the 90s, albeit not widely, and was then popularised. Why is that hard to admit?

Someone has literally posted a few references

Only in the first poem. The article literally says:

“Oh, my sweet summer child” could be anything from a simple comment on the beauty and grace of a small child playing in the summer sun to a verbal head shake at unfathomable naïveté. It can refer to a very young child born in summer, a person with a summery disposition, or a person who has little to no experience of “winter:” hardship, trials, and tribulations, or just someone who is clueless as to anything that has happened before they came on the scene.
In the 60s and 70s, I frequently heard it in response to some bit of pre-teen or teen angst I expressed in my youthful confidence that in under two decades I had managed to acquire far more wisdom than had the totality of adults of my acquaintance. “You really think no one else has thought of that? Oh, my sweet summer child.”

As if George R R Martin invented it! Have you ever watched Black Books?!

I don’t understand
noones claiming it was commonplace, only that the author of GoT took an existing, obscure, saying and used it, and that made it popular

To be fair, the book came out in 1996, well before Black Books.

Well before? Four years before. And who read the books as opposed to just watched the TV show? I get your point, but I think 99.9% of people who watched GOT never read the books.

This is just hilarious. My grandparents have been saying this my whole life.

Nope, but he did invent this idiom, though!

If it really was a common expression you'd think there would be actual documented use of it.

The only 'proof; people sight, are the same three poems, which do not use the words in the same context that GRRM intended.

Why is there no use of this phrase being used, in a way to suggest nativity, in any literate that is available online before the first book? 100 years of nothing and suddenly becomes a thing in 1995.

Here is a YT video going deeper into it, if anyone is bored.

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Sure, but that's not relevant to the discussion.

OP you are so wrong. People were using this saying before you were even born. It's reference is to innocence, a child who does not yet know what wiser people know. Your thread is a good example of this.

I would admit if I was wrong, gladly.

A simple basic google shows you the same three poems those words were mentioned in. But they were not used in the same context as the show.

And moreover, the phrase is not mentioned anywhere else in any literature available before the first GOT book in 1995! 100 plus years and nothing. Not once.

If it was common parlance in any country, common sense would tell you that it would appear somewhere.

According to you.

I am not really arsed about GOT or the phrase, but I am interested in this comment:
“between the internet becoming commonplace and GOT being released…”

When was that? People here saying GOT first book was released in 1996, but the internet was not ‘commonplace’ before that? I worked for a big company in the 90s, multinational/household name. At the end of 96 we ‘got the internet’ in our UK marketing department - just one computer with internet in a department of 35 people.

Can you me to that please?

Thanks for that. It is so odd watching people tie themselves in knots to explain how everyone used it before the 90s, but also it was so rarely used that it never made the internet, and that it’s a commonplace saying, but also one that only shares words but not meanings with Victorian poems. Very odd.

Hardly anyone read the book. It was the show that introduced the saying.

Tbh (further to my earlier post) I’ve no idea if it was around pre GoT or not and I don’t really care!

It is an annoying expression either way. Much like saying “bless your heart” as others have said.

It is used as an attempt to suggest naïveté on the part of the other person almost as if its use in itself bolsters the speaker’s argument, but of course it does no such thing!

Ok. It wasn’t clear from your post that you specifically meant the TV series.

"False memory"

So now you are saying all of us who have heard it used long before the 1990s are all making this up ??

Bless.

You would only need a single one of the scriptwriters on Black Books to have read the GOT books, for that to be where they got it from 🤷‍♀️

Or any of the other literature that has been quoted going much farther back. They could have read that too... or are people confusing popularistaion with actual fact?

When I lived in the southern states of US in the early 1990s it was widely used in exactly that manner. “You sweet summer child”

Everyday usage there going back a long time.

This thread is blowing my mind. I have clear memories of the phrase from way back. Either I'm experiencing full on Mandela effect or Google and the OP are gaslighting me! Honestly unsure which way to lean.

You’re wrong. I’m 62 and have had it said to me before the internet was invented.