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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, I wanted to begin a series

investigating the origins and meaning of a phrase, a phrase that I have heard all my life,

mostly without understanding. And that phrase is the dog days of summer.

Definitely an expression that's been on my mind the past few weeks.

We've had some brutally hot days here in my neighborhood, I assume in years too, Rob.

It's been pretty hot.

Yeah.

And in a lot of the rest of the northern hemisphere.

It's just been hot times all around.

And like the other day, I was, I was grilling for a get-together.

And so it's like the sun is just vicious.

And then you've got heat coming up from below to on the grill.

And it's just like, woof.

Now, I don't know when I first heard this phrase, the dog days of summer, but I believe I can recall some of the assumptions I had about this phrase when I was young.

So I thought it applied to a sort of a subsection of summer, like the days later in the summer season, I thought of it as like late August. I don't know why. The dog days had the connotation of heat, but not necessarily like happy, fun time, playing outdoors heat, more like kind of sickening oppressive heat threatening heat you better

be at a swimming pool or or the beach heat yeah yeah and i also i i think took the name dog days of

summer quite literally in interpreting where it came from i thought the dog days must have something to do with the

health or behavior of dogs. They're called that because this is the time of year when

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