You can credit ancient Romans with naming what we now call the “dog days of summer.” They called the period, from the first week of July to the second week of August, dies caniculares because a particularly bright star, dubbed the “dog star,” became invisible during midsummer and, they believed, made the sun even hotter than usual. It was bad astrophysics, but the name stuck and came to mean days when it’s too hot for real...
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