Silly season

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The silly season is the period lasting for a few months (starting in mid- to late summer) in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. This term was known by the end of the 19th century and 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 (about August and September)".

Typically, the latter half of the summer is slow in terms of newsworthy events. Historically, newspapers (which rely upon advertisements as their primary means of income) see a drop-off in readership during this time. In the UK, Parliament takes its summer recess, so that parliamentary debates and Prime Minister's Questions, which generate much news footage, do not take place. In order to retain (and attract) subscribers, newspapers would print attention-grabbing headlines and articles to boost sales, often to do with minor moral panics or child abductions. Other countries have comparable periods, f.i. the "Sommerloch" (summer [news]hole) in Germany and "Mätäkuun juttu" ("rotten-month feature") in Finland.

In Australia, the silly season has come to refer to the christmas/New Year festive period as the Southern Hemisphere summer coincides with this period.

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 (cf: The Sun, The National Enquirer etc).

It also refers to off-seasons in sports, such as NFL, NBA or Formula One — where due to lack of action on field/track, speculations are instead made on possible team changes and debuts of any star involved in the sport. Possibly the most famous sports-related usage of this term comes from NASCAR blogger Jayski, whose website was originally called "Jayski's Silly Season Report" to focus on team-switching, new driver testing and other goings-on during the racing series' winter hiatus.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 15th edition, 1996 published by Cassell.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 2nd edition, 1898, online: definition for silly season