Listen up all of you “hotter than a jalapeno’s armpit,” hotties out there, is it hot enough for ya? In my opinion, it’s “hotter than blue blazes” and “forty dammits.”
I love the southern description of extremely hot conditions, “It’s so dang hot that I just saw a hound dog chasing a rabbit – and they were both walking.” Can you picture it?
“I’m wilting,” I exclaimed in a slow drawn-out pant! Or better yet, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, “I’m melt-ing.” Are you “sweating bullets?”
You know there’s hot, and there’s freaking hot, as I’m freaking out that it’s so hot. There’s “hot tin roof” hot, and so hot on our deck that our cat skims across it at lightning speed to avoid hurting his tender toe beans. PSA, a rug has promptly been installed.
It’s hot “like an oven.” If you believe in the existence of hell or not, it feels perhaps like as hot as….
We’re sizzling like bacon with a side of fried eggs cooked up on our car hood. A quart of sunscreen is the only thing between us and becoming human pork rinds.
We’re having a hard time keeping our prayers focused between beseeching God to please stop the rain long enough for us to mow our overgrown green growth, and to give us grace to pay the upcoming air conditioning bill. Solar power, or mower gas, pick your power, or your poison. This summer it seems to be one or the other.
Yep, it’s that time of year. Even here in the Northeast, we can expect temperatures to rise into the nineties at least a few days each summer.
However, each year we act like it’s a new development that it gets hot in June, July and August. Nowadays we can blame it on global warming. I’m not sure what they blamed it on back in the olden days, whenever that was, in the past.
Maybe they blamed the summer heat on the writers of the Farmer’s Almanac, with its fifty percent accuracy, which is a smidge better than our trusty neighborhood groundhog. Many of us modern people, however, tend to put our trust for weather predictions in the weather app on our phones.
But it turns out that those apps can only be trusted generally, not literally. So, I’ve learned to trust weather predictions, generally. For example, “it’s gonna be really hot next week,” or “it’s probably going to rain at least a little bit every day for over a week,” suffice for my predictive understanding of the upcoming weather.
One would think that “hot, is hot.” But apparently “hot” is not the same to everybody. Generally, most people would agree that ninety-degree heat is “hot.”
However, even though most of us agree that the weather in the nineties is hot, “some like it hot.” That’s the point on which we differ. Paris Hilton, in the early 2000s, popularized the phrase, “that’s hot,” which she shared on the front of a t-shirt, while the back said, “and you’re not.”
Some of us, in summer, are prone to wear the t-shirt, saying on the front, “it’s too hot.” I’m sure, however, as we walk away, a bunch of you summer-lovers guarantee that the back of our t-shirt says, “no, it’s not.”
Oh, my goodness, sweat surely evaporates from your body more quickly than it escapes mine. Sweat likes to kick off its shoes and dwell on top of my arms, not to mention the God-forsaken nether-regions of the body which I will not mention.
And does the hot-loving population like to sweat? Please explain what’s fun about a heat-headache?
When we lived in the Southwest, we experienced heat without the notable humidity which characterizes the heat in the East. The temperatures in Pennsylvania and New Mexico during the time of our tenure between the two locales were nearly identical. But what a difference the humidity made. It was discernibly hot in New Mexico, but it wasn’t miserable like the same temperature offered in Pennsylvania. Humidity makes a difference.
The word, “hot” has for several centuries referred not only to temperature, but to intensity, as in our current cute expression, “he’s coming in hot;” as well as passion and sexual attraction, e.g., “she’s hot.” Paris Hilton may have enhanced the connotation of hot as something “cool,” trendy, and desirable such as Jessica Simpson’s “I don’t know what it is, but I want it” fame.
How can “hot,” be “cool?” Both, I think, are relatives, dwelling squarely in the eye of the beholder. Cool and hot are not the same for all of us. Hot is personal and general, not literal nor universal.
Hot is one of those things that is left up in the air for interpretation. We must agree to disagree as to what is hot and what is not.