Yesterday, Bug looked at Belle, tilted her head, and said, “Well, you sweet summer child.”
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.
Belle, bless her heart, was offended. And I can’t say I blame her. Anybody raised in the South knows that being called a sweet summer child isn’t necessarily a compliment. It’s what you say when somebody is too innocent, too trusting, or too young to know any better. It’s a pat on the head with just enough sugar to disguise the fact that you’ve been insulted.
But what got me laughing wasn’t Belle’s reaction. It was the fact that I hadn’t heard that expression in years, and hearing it again brought back memories of my childhood. I could practically hear one of my babysitters saying it.
So, naturally, I asked Bug where on earth she’d picked it up.
“Game of Thrones.”
Excuse me?
Now, I don’t claim to know everything, but I know what I heard growing up. And I was about 99.9 percent certain that expression had been floating around North Carolina long before anybody dreamed up the Starks of Winterfell.
So I did what any reasonable woman would do when the internet starts rewriting her childhood. I went digging.
Turns out, the phrase sweet summer child predates George R. R. Martin by a good long while.
In 1996, Martin published A Game of Thrones, the first book in his fantasy series. In it, an old woman named Old Nan tells Bran Stark, “Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of fear?” In Martin’s fictional world, seasons can last for years, so a child born in summer has never experienced the hardship of winter.
It’s a good line. I’ll give him that.
The HBO adaptation brought the expression to an even wider audience in 2011, and the internet has been crediting Martin with it ever since.
But the phrase was appearing in American poetry in the 1800s. James Staunton Babcock used it in his 1849 poem “The West Wind,” and Mary Whitaker used a variation in her 1850 poem “The Creole.” Similar wording appeared in other poems throughout the nineteenth century.
Back then, the expression was used more tenderly, evoking the warmth and innocence of summer. Somewhere along the way, it picked up the meaning I remember: somebody who hasn’t lived long enough to know how hard life can be.
And I’ll be danged if that isn’t exactly how my babysitter used it.
She said it when I asked a question with an obvious answer. She said it when I believed something a cousin told me. She said it when I was young enough to think the world was a fair place and people generally meant what they said.
She’d deliver it with just enough sweetness that you didn’t realize you’d been insulted until you were halfway home.
That, my friends, is an art form.
I KNOW I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE.
Once I started looking, I found other folks who remembered hearing the expression from their grandmothers, great-aunts, and other family members decades before Game of Thrones ever made it to television. Plenty of people, particularly those with Southern roots, remember it as an old family saying.
I can’t personally vouch for every recollection I found, but I can tell you this: I heard it growing up, too.
And here’s the thing about Southern expressions. Most of them weren’t written down. They were passed from one generation to the next over kitchen tables, on front porches, in church fellowship halls, and in the back seats of station wagons while somebody’s babysitter tried to keep a bunch of children from killing each other.
Nobody was thinking about preserving the language. Nobody was compiling a dictionary of things their grandmama said. It was just how folks talked.
Then somebody famous puts a phrase in a book, Hollywood puts it on television, and suddenly the internet acts like it was invented yesterday.
The trouble is, the written record doesn’t always tell the whole story. Just because a phrase appears in a book doesn’t mean the author was the first person to say it. It means somebody finally put it on paper.
Maybe George R. R. Martin heard it somewhere. Maybe he came across one of those old poems. Maybe the expression came to him independently. I don’t know, and I’m not accusing the man of stealing anybody’s grandmother’s vocabulary.
But I do know that the phrase existed long before his book was published, and I know I heard it in North Carolina long before I ever heard of Westeros.
It’s kin to “bless your heart.”
If you’ve spent any time in the South, you already know we can wrap an insult in enough affection to make you thank us for it.
“Bless your heart” can be a sincere expression of sympathy. It can also mean you’ve done something so foolish that the only reasonable response is to pray for you.
“Sweet summer child” belongs to that same family of expressions. It can be affectionate, gently teasing, or a warning that you’re about to learn something the hard way.
It’s a way of saying, “Honey, you haven’t lived long enough yet.”
And sometimes, that’s exactly what a person needs to hear.
So, Bug, you may have learned the expression from Game of Thrones, but don’t go telling folks that’s where it started. The words have been around since at least the nineteenth century, and I suspect they were spoken plenty of times before anybody bothered to write them down.
And Belle, honey, I know it stung. But one of these days, you’re going to look at somebody younger than you, shake your head, and hear those very words coming out of your own mouth.
When that day comes, you’ll understand.
Being called a sweet summer child means somebody has lived long enough to know what you haven’t learned yet. And if they say it with a little love mixed in, they might just be trying to save you some trouble.
Now, I want to hear from y’all. Did you grow up hearing “sweet summer child”? Who said it to you? Your mama? Your grandmama? An auntie who could put you in your place without ever raising her voice?
Tell me in the comments. Because I know good and well that Westeros didn’t teach every Southern grandmother how to talk.
