When a person online, or even a news website, says that something is happening in “winter” for example, there’s no way to know whether this means (roughly) Q1 or Q3, since the same seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. You can assume the common convention of using the American or Northern Hemisphere system, but there’s always some doubt because people in the Southern Hemisphere typically also use the seasons that relate to their own region even when discussing things on a global platform.
Not to mention there are probably people who may not even know what that terminology refers to if they’re in a location that doesn’t use the same seasonal weather system, forcing them to learn and use a system that doesn’t apply to their country and is only relevant to a different part of the world.
It’s often said that on the internet, everyone assumes you’re a man. I think it’s also true that everyone assumes you’re American or at least from the Northern Hemisphere… Which is fine for the people that are, and that may well be the majority for certain “Western”- or English-oriented platforms, but for those that aren’t it can be very confusing…
Possible objections:
• Quarters/trimesters (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) are also used for the fiscal year, which luckily mostly aligns with the calendar year-based quarters in the majority of the world, but in some countries such as Australia and New Zealand (which ironically, due to being in the Southern Hemisphere, would benefit the most from abandoning the seasonal system in favor of a quarter-based system), use a different fiscal year system that begins in the middle of the calendar year, meaning what is Financial Quarter 1 for most of the world would be Financial Quarter 3 for certain regions. So this does create a situation where Financial Quarters could be confused with Calendar Quarters and in cases where they don’t align, but if it’s established that the default system for describing those approximate time ranges (3-month periods, or trimesters) universally is the calendar-quarter system, then it could be understood that the fiscal quarter system would only be used when talking in a strictly financial context, and additionally it should be specified what country or region that refers to regardless since it does differ (unless it’s implied based on the context) - in the same way that if you’re describing seasons because it relates to actual weather events, the region should probably be specified.
• Quarters and seasons aren’t completely aligned - which is even moreso the case in the Southern Hemisphere where the seasons are more along the lines of Dec-Jan-Feb, Mar-Apr-May, Jun-Jul-Aug, Sep-Oct-Nov. However, when the seasons are relevant for weather purposes, then it still makes sense to use them context dependantly, and I think the fact that Quarters can be more clearly defined as exactly 3 month periods of the year that begin on Jan 1 and end on Dec 31 makes them even more logical to use to refer to time ranges for events that aren’t weather-dependent - using seasons is just a rough heuristic for describing time ranges that are more relevant to actual quarters anyway, but one that is failing in my opinion.
• People can just say “Autumn/Fall (USA)” or “Spring (Australia)” for example and always specify the region along with the season, as an alternative to using quarters/trimesters, but this is overly complicated, seems likely to be abbreviated to just the season in contexts that assume the audience is from the same region (in the way it already typically is), and also requires people to work out what time periods the seasons refer to in the country specified rather than an immediately understandable universal system of Quarters (I also wish the International Standardization Organization would promote this [correct me if they have already, but there is a Wikipedia discussion to normalize using Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4 instead of seasons for most pages that aren’t weather related] in the same way they promote the ISO 8601 format of YYYY-MM-DD and 24 hour time, both for better digital alphabetical ordering, and to avoid confusions between different date and time formats).
Personally I use 24 hr time and YYYY-MM-DD date format almost exclusively, but here in the US you’ll get a bunch of people arguing and frothing at the mouth that MM-DD-YYYY is way superior because you say “March 16th 2025” instead of “2025 March 16th” and 24 hr clock is called “military time” because they are the ones using it. So, in short, it’ll take a lot of effort to change people’s habits.
Even Spring (Australia) doesn’t work locally. Generally, if you are above the Tropic of Capricorn, you have the wet season and the dry season.
I think other people just look for additional context. E.g. if you’re reading a news article where the subject is the northern hemisphere then winter is clear. If there is no context, it’s probably just poorly written content.
- Switch date tracking over to trimesters
- America suspends the advancement of time because they assume it has something to do with abortions
Thank you for this, I nearly spit my coffee on the table.
We can’t even agree on how to describe temperature and OP thinks we can change something as old as written word.
Rest of the world is doing fine, just Americans struggle with that one. But for some reason not in engineering or science?
I think the solution to the problem with quarters is to say “calendar quarter”.
