Indian summer - indian summer

[Siantova]

Hi!

Is there any difference in meaning in the following:

Indian summer - capitalised

indian summer - lower case.

The book written by Graham King: Good Punctuation, 2000 states under Miscellany: indian summer, nothing more is written about the capital letters in this case. Sometimes it is extremely difficult for non native speakers to understand the rules of English language. The rules are different from book to book.

Thanks

[Dozy]

As you probably know, while "Indian summer" can literally mean "a summer in India", it is most often used to mean a period of warm autumn weather, or, figuratively, a happy or productive episode at the end of a period of time (such as one's life).

Whatever its meaning, I would always write it as "Indian summer". "indian summer" looks wrong to me.

[Siantova]

I understand that it can look a wrong to you, however, the above mentioned book states indian summer with lower case. :)

[Beeesneees]

I would also always capitalise 'Indian'.
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Cheers m' dears!

[Dozy]

I notice that Collins English Dictionary lists it as "indian summer". All other dictionaries I've checked list it only with "Indian" capitalised. Google Book results also show an overwhelming preference for "Indian" to be capitalised:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=indian+summer%2C+Indian+summer%2C+Indian+Summer&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Of course, some of these results may be using the term literally, in which case "Indian" would certainly need capitalising, and others may be in title case, but even so it seems pretty conclusive.

[Jamie (K)]

The Merriam-Webster dictionary -- which is American, and after all, America is where we have Indian summer and where the term originated -- calls for "Indian summer" with a capital "I". So does the Oxford UK dictionary. And I've never seen it with a small I in my life.

Takže já bych považoval to malé písmeno za vystřednost nakladatelsví Collins. Zdá se, že nikdo jiný ten výraz s malým i nepíše.