Juilletistes or Aoûtiens - When Would You Spend Your Summer Holiday: July or August? - French
On sensitive souls who make up special words for their preference regarding holiday time and grant us an opportunity to daydream about summer even in cold days
How many of us are daydreaming about a summer holiday even now, in the first weeks of the new year?
The longest night is left behind, and even though many of the beautiful places in the world are covered in snow (hopefully not overheated because of climate change), we have only a couple of months until the first days of spring. So why not dream a little bit of sunny days on the beach?
To be honest, it’s easier for me to imagine sunny days now, since today is a quite bright and cheerful day in Istanbul so far.
Juilletistes is a special French word expressing the French who prefer July as their vacation time instead of August. Weird enough, there is also a French word for people who go on vacation in August, aoûtiens.
Having enough time to rest is important, especially for relatively southern European countries. You can observe it obviously when you visit Italy or Spain, since after 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. you can hardly find a restaurant or even a cafe to have a meal. They close earlier and mostly enjoy their siesta hours, which can never be sacrificed, even at the cost of disappointing their customers.
My husband is in a small town in North Italy now for a business trip, and he’s quite surprised at the over-calm lives of the local people, who even state that they close their restaurants during most of the summer. It’s surprising for us since this is not the case in Turkey, as well as many other places around the world.
In 1973, Aoûtien became the first word to appear in the official Larousse dictionary, followed by juilletiste in 1990. Aoûtiens have historically been miners and factory workers because August is typically associated with workplace closures. Juilletistes, on the other hand, were largely white-collar workers who had more control over their vacation schedule.
Meanwhile, the French now have septembristes, who avoid the throngs of juilletistes and aoûtiens, who are youngers, elders, or couples without children attending school.
I just wanted to resemble the warmest days to warm your hearts with the help of French culture. How nice for a society to keep some special words for the time of the holidays. How light and sensitive.
Of course, sometimes it makes me think that some people can have the time and mood to think of such “seemingly luxurious” things, which would only be a faraway fairy tale for many people struggling under the conditions of war or poverty in other areas of the world.
But I still believe such delicacy is quite necessary to keep humanity durable against any circumstances, just like the effect of art, which gives us the spiritual endurance to protect our soul and heart even in the most cruel times.
I wish everyone a warm and cheerful weekend and week.
Till next week,
— Gulsun
Thank you for taking the time to accompany me in the story of a new word. Every word of the world’s languages is also ours, belonging to humanity while giving us an essence of the culture in which it was rooted.
We are made of stories—that is, of words.