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Hello, etymology fans. Were smack dab in the middle of a real Seattle summer, and if youre anything like me, youre enjoying our sudden, sharp sunshine and warm temperatures. The yellow orb that lives behind layers of grey mist has finally reappeared, and it does strange, silly things to us Northwesterners (like driving us en masse to buy sunglasses and complain about heat waves). But that also brings me to this special summer word, silly.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that we get silly from the Middle English sely, or seely, from a mishmash of related Germanic words. Something that was sely was happy, blissful or fortunate, lucky, well-omened, or auspicious. Contrast that to our modern definition, which describes any kind of behavior as silly if it is evincing or associated with foolishness.

The word as it was known to folks living at the tail end of the Middle Ages, however, had a more serious meaning, less Stephen Colbert and more C-SPAN.

Someone or something that was silly in the 15th century was deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy, was helpless or weak, feeble, frail, insignificant, [or] trifling. In the 16th century, to give an example, silly was used to describe sheep, the iconically hapless creature, in bucolic poems. Silly was also a stand-in for the unlearned, unsophisticated, simple, rustic, or ignorant, for the weak or deficient in intellect; [the] feeble-minded, [or] imbecile.

Lets just say that you wouldnt want to be silly.

By the end of the 16th century, the words association with the mentally underwhelming (i.e. foolish) became more prominent, though the OED notes that its a bit hard to decipher just how the word was used. My sense is that it had a meaner streak.

This was softened somewhat by none other than Shakespeare who used it in Loves Labours Lost and Midsummer Nights Dream in ways more familiar with the 21st century. In the latter case, Hippolyta is skeptical of the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

Since the Bards day, silly has become, well, sillier, less serious, and thought of as more comic than plain dumb. This might come from the influence of the press.

In the 19th century, the London-based newspapers of Fleet Street would scramble for any kind of news, real or imagined, during the slow summer months when the city emptied in the hot weather. The Aug. 23, 1884 edition of the Illustrated London News notes, for instance, that the silly season having begun in real earnest, the newspapers are, as a necessary consequence, full of instructive and amusing matter.

Even with the advent of air conditioning in the 20th century, news was still slow during the hottest part of the year, with schools out, civic groups on breaks, and government in recess (the U.S. Senate still maintains a vacation in August). Echoes of the silly season can thus be felt today.

The rest is here:
Will’s word: ‘silly’