Editor's Corner

Good morning, folks!

As I look outside, it is very foggy, and mamma squirrel is out at my food dish, fattening up for the cooler weather. Even though I’m not in Seattle anymore, I know the leaves are starting to change color and I feel a little homesick.

Autumn (or fall) is my favorite season, so let’s warm up a pumpkin spice latte or some hot apple cider and look at some details about the season.

At Dictonary.com, there is a full article about the seasons, but I’m just going to share a bit.

The word autumn comes from the French autompne, from the Latin autumnus, whose deeper roots are obscure. It’s first recorded in English as early as the late 1300s.

Recorded use of the word fall as the name of the third season of the year comes from as early as the 1500s. The name is thought to originate in the phrase the fall of the leaf, in reference to the time of year when deciduous trees shed their leaves. The name of its inverse season, spring, is thought to come from the phrase spring of the leaf—the time when everything is blossoming.

Americans and the British used both fall and autumn until around the 1600s, when the British went “all autumn” and kicked “fall” to the curb. Americans waited until the 1800s and started using fall more frequently.

There’s one more term for autumn that is even older: the season harvest. It’s from the “Old English word hærfest, of Germanic origin, perhaps with an underlying, ancient sense of “picking, plucking” (as in, picking fruits to harvest them).”

I have some grammatical rules I’ll share with you later (for the capitalization of seasons in our writing), but today we’re just going to stick with the different names for seasons and discuss when the fall, autumn, or harvest occurs. Here are some final details:

In the Northern Hemisphere, fall is roughly between August and November, technically lasting from the autumnal equinox until the winter solstice . In the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are flipped, fall is roughly between the end of March and the end of June.

So, as Judy Garland sang in the 1950 movie Summer Stock, “Howdy neighbor! Happy Harvest!”

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Technical Publications

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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