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'Daylight Savings' Is Grammatically Incorrect (qz.com)
A reader shares a report: We talk about time like it's money, and that may explain why we say "Daylight Savings Time," capitalizing the concept to emphasize its awesomeness. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to save hours like cash? The phrase "Daylight Savings Time," though commonly used in Australia, Canada, and the US, is technically incorrect. Time and Date, a website devoted to all things chronological, posits that the plural "savings" became popular because it's used in everyday contexts, like "savings account." The grammatically correct usage is "daylight saving time." The expression is singular and not capitalized, according to the US Government Publishing Office style guide. The GPO provides the guidance, "d.s.t., daylight saving (no 's') time."
Whats the deal with "man-holes"?
Wow, full retard.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We now have a grammar nazi post on the front page. Slashdot has really evolved, from the nascent grammar troll posts, through the mercurial grammar nazi years, to a full fledged front page grammar post.
I'm going to continue to say Daylight Savings Time, because that is how nearly everyone says it, and alter the language irrevocably. In 50 years, hopefully we will have done away with daylight savings time completely and this topic will be dead, but if we have not, Daylight Savings Time will be the correct way to say it.
Fuck daylight saving time.
Daylight Saving's time.
This might be the least relevant Slashdot post I've ever seen. And I'm proud to be a part of it.
There's not even an argument for the abolition of the time change and the programming task ahead if such a decision is made!
Seriously. STFU.
How the hell does a little piece of garbage nitpick like this make it to the front page of slashdot?
Is the motto still "news for nerds. stuff that matters"?
Hey, Cliff Clavin, glad to see you off the bar stool and out on the W's.
Some settling may occur during posting.
Yawn.
Really? Are you a millennial by any chance?
This has appeared in newspapers (look that up) pretty much every year since I've been able to read.
no comment.
Because that's TOTALLY why everyone hates it, the incorrect grammar.
I was always a proponent of Daylight Saving Time. Moving all the clocks ahead or back an hour was always a lot of fun.
This, though, ruins it for me. I think we should ban DST altogether.
Trolling is a art,
I won't beat the "How is this news?" drum, because that's already been hit multiple times. What I want to know is, why now? We're nowhere close to the change from or to DST, so what brought this up to begin with?
Nope, no sig
This is Slashdot
Who Tango Foxtrot cares about grammer or spelling
I would be more concerned about the actual fact that we don't actually 'save' any daylight
I bet your fun at partys.
What's the grammatically correct emoji to express daylight saving time?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
So sad that this is the crap thats getting posted on slashdot now. One of the first great tech news site, now just blithering idiots trying to push social ideals on people. Take a look at what happened to other media outlets that abandoned their purpose for this crap.
This bothers me less than people confusing abbreviations for standard and daylight saving time per time zone. I will propose times for meetings in EDT and get back responses with EST. I suppose that also can still be understood, but is more inaccurate than a grammatical error.
Pedantic nerds are so annoying. You know what's the best way to deal with pedantic nerds? You beat them up. Hard. You twist their arms so hard they will not be able to jerk off for months. You shit on their faces. And then you shove them heads-down into a wastebasket.
One of the issues with saying d.s.t should be lowercase is that time zones are regularly capitalized. Eastern Standard Time becomes Eastern Daylight Time. Now people have in their heads that "Daylight" is a proper noun. I'm on board with dropping the "s" but I'll likely continue capitalizing. Until people start regularly following US GPO standard on capitalization of timezones, I think this is probably a fight lost.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Pedantic, pedantic, Pedantic!!!!
Best video on the subject ever: https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo
OK, only video on the subject, likely, but still the best ever. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Daylight saving time. Not a single second of daylight is saved by this ploy.
- Crazy English
Daylight Savings has a bit of twang to it, as in, "Wez iz savings sum daylight"
--
"Time Out!" - Mom
I'm a professional linguist, and here's my message to the author: go fuck yourself
Let's just keep it all year and stop changing the time.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Mein Obergrammerfuhrer.
And 'daylight saving time' was idiocy six ways from Gomorrah in the first place. AC
We don't have DST here you insensitive clods. It's just "summer time" or "GMT". I've always wondered why you provincial folks refer to it as DST. I'd be very happy for it to be summer time all year around!
And why wouldn't it be Daylight-Saving(s) Time? Expanding on the comparison in the summary, you could say a savings account, moneymarket account, or moneymarket savings account (no need for hyphenation). To the contrary, you wouldn't say Saving Time or Daylight Time, and saving has little reference to time and more reference to daylight, so I would posit Daylight-Saving(s) should be hyphenated.
There is no reason to continue this anachronism any more.
Steven Pinker last book The better angels of our nature talks about how much the cost of artificial light has fallen in the last three hundred years.
It is high time we get rid of it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
(Insert your own joke about there being two days of actual summer in the UK here).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...are the people who take the time to point this out.
They believe that they're just being helpful, pointing out a common grammatical mistake of usage.
What they're really doing is showing the rest of us that they're annoying as fuck so we can avoid them generally.
Grammar Nazis are like the intellectual equivalent of skunk smell, warning us all away from something we REALLY don't want to experience any more closely.
It's socially a very useful thing. Thank you, Grammar Nazis.
-Styopa
It's going to be a real drag if I have to write daylight saving (no 's') time every single time I want to mention it. That's sort of like "News for Nerds (no 'z'), Stuff that Matters."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Because it doesn't save anything.
It's also logically wrong, because you don't actually save any daylight by closing the curtains to be able to see the TV or computer, the sun still shines (believe it or not, I've been outside to check), so it should actually be daylight wasting time.
The daylight we are wasting in the evening is then replaced by electrical light in the morning.
Get rid of that shit.
I wont use either term until someone explains how any daylight is saved at all. Until then, it is daylight time and standard time for me.
Seriously people. Don't you have better things to think about!
Yes, I did spend 20 seconds on this post. What's it to ya?
"though commonly used in Australia"
Fuck off.
By who? The same idiots who say "safeways"?
I've always known it as Daylight Saving Time. The first time I ever heard anyone say otherwise was the lyrics to The Bad Touch.
... because we were all just SO *confused* about it!
I can sleep easy now, am totally plussed.
and this seems pretty nitpicky to me.
Shifting the clocks is a colossally stupid thing anyway. Why do we even bother? Just shift all the time zones permanently to DST and get back to life.
Besides, I assure you that, whatever you do with your time pieces, there will be exactly the same amount of daylight. Nothing you do to your clocks does anything with daylight. It doesn't save it.
Grammer Knotsees kan eet et!
Table-ized A.I.
This might be news to the author - Australia and Canada don't give a shit what the US Government Publishing Office style guide says.
Never mind the grammar, ghowever you spell and capitalise it the term is complete nonsense.
Firstly, DST is generally applied in the summer when daylight hours are actually in surplus. If there's any point in the year where we need to save daylight, it is the winter.
Secondly, DST doesn't actually save any time. It may look like you have got a bit of extra daylight in the evening, but it turns out that is because it was robbed from the morning. The whole thing is some kind of scam.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Totally agreed grammar nazi posts don't deserve to be on the front page.
But isn't it called a "savings account" (plural) because you deposit money you've saved on multiple occasions into it? Likewise, shouldn't it be "daylight savings" because you save daylight on multiple days? i.e. If we only changed the clocks for one day, then it would be "daylight saving time." But since we change the clocks for multiple days, doesn't that make "daylight savings time" correct?
Are we to the point where we're making pedantry into an actual story!? Is there nothing better to post on the goddamned front page!?
The plural attributive construction is well established as standard, and has been on the rise for the past 70 to 80 odd years. It's standard everywhere, but is somewhat more common in British English than American English. If the OP were interested, they could read about this topic in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al 1985), where it is covered starting on page 1333, although somehow I doubt they're interested.
I'm just trying to get everyone to call the winter shifted time "daylight wasting time." I don't care about the capitalization, though considering that other periods of time, like months or days, are capitalized, it might be logical to capitalize it. Perhaps I should trademark it and capitalize on the merchandising. :)
To use an old Sioux saying:
"Daylight saving time is like cutting a foot off of your blanket and sewing it on to the other end, and thinking you have made it longer!"
...which is why 'daylight savings time' is really called summer time.
And do it, not do it and make the clock lie about you doing it.
Agreed, let's vote to change it to Daylight Shifting Time.
If we can't eliminate daylight "savings time" might as well give it a name that isn't misleading.
+1 for "Daylight Shifting Time"
Why should you get up at 9am, four hours before midday at 1pm rather than at 8 am, the same time of the day, but this time without making the clock lie about your lie-in?
It isn't a grammar issue for whether to use "saving" or "savings". It's what the official name of the thing is that matters. If the relevant authorities say it is "saving", it is "saving". If they agree that "savings" is okay, then "savings" is okay. It's about naming things correctly, not grammar. Whether the name makes grammatic sense of not *does not matter*. Names need not make any sense whatsoever. They just *are* and behave like any other noun grammatically no matter how they were formed.
What is clear is that there is a natural tendency to use "savings" in this context in English for whatever reason (whether it's due to the reason suggested in the summary or some more fundamental thing about English syntax/grammar) and that tendancy goes back a *long* time. That should suggest to the relevant authorities and pedants alike that insisting on "saving" is a lost cause.
(And don't get me started on things that various pedant types have insisted are incorrect but which have no basis in the history of English. Like not splitting infinities or not ending sentences with prepositions, both things that English has done since forever. But that's off topic here.)
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
Is it Keith Richard or Keith Richards?
pic related,
https://i.imgur.com/04pOwzq_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium
DST is a sham and should be killed off already. The bonus is that it will fix the grammatical issue because nobody will need to use the term anymore.
that's been the joke about dst forever.
i think i first heard it (daylight savings time doesn't 'save' daylight) in preschool or kindergarten, 50 years ago.
In the UK we call it British Summer Time (B.S.T.) because if we didn't how would we know it was summer.
Measuring the savings of "daylight saving time", as promoted by Congress, and the promise of an extra hour of daylight, I find no actual savings, nor is there an extra hour of daylight. But this may be measured after taxes and fees were deducted. Congress is hellbent on taxing everything and I really have no way to tell for sure that there was no hidden daylight saving tax stealing away that promised extra hour.
Call it what you will. Pass laws if you like. The reality is that the sun does not care and no daylight will be saved. Farmers and fisherpeople will continue to live by the sun and the seasons.
However millions of people who have to go to school or jobs will be horribly inconvenienced by those who manipulate our clocks.
...omphaloskepsis often...
As attributed to a wise Native American, "You can't make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off the top and sewing it to the bottom."
... as in "destroy them"!
...
Destroy them!
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
In another ten to fifteen years the ability to type legibly will be as over as the ability to speak when face to face is for teenagers that just want to keep tap-fapping on their cell phones. So who the hell cares about grammatical nonsense? Or time, for that matter. It's all illusory.
When I was a child, I was taught there were right and wrong ways of saying things, so I could communicate with others. That was decades ago.
Then I learned that language evolves, and what is spoken and permissible nowadays are totally different words and formats than from when I was a child--I've adapted so I can communicate with others.
That's what grown adults do, relate to those around them and their community, not try to enforce specific aberrations of speech or stay stuck in the past. If you can shift your clock forward in the Spring, you can stop calling it Daylight Saving Time and refer to it as everyone else does, Daylight Savings Time, which matches nicely with other "savings"; and fits with the plural aspect of it, as there are lots of different Daylight Savings times in various places with different starts and endings.
When I was a farmer, all the farmers blamed the city boys and golfers for DST. Farmers hated it and thought it was stupid because all it accomplished is messing up animals set on a schedule twice a year.
When I lived in the city, all the city boys blamed the farmers for DST. City boys hated it because they thought it just randomly moved the goalposts on travel time to and from work to maximize the amount of time you spend with the sun DIRECTLY in your eyes during your commute.
So if everybody hates it and blames someone else for it, WHY THE FUCK DOES IT STILL EXIST? Gah.
Let's just call it "Just get up an hour earlier, you lazy bastard, if you want more daylight" time.
God damn it, i was saving for my retirement!
Or, the more likely explanation ... you're a moron, and in places DST makes a huge difference in the timing of usable daylight throughout the year.
Where I live, in the summer it's the difference between a day which runs from 4am-8am in terms of daylight, or with DST one which runs from 5am-9pm in terms of daylight. DST pushes that to times which more people will be able to enjoy.
Where you live may be at a different latitude, but if you think it's a sham you're a fucking moron.
Try to keep up, would you?
You forgot to mention mute points.
And we literally completely lost "literally" as well.
Maybe it's time for some new leadership in the Grammar Nazi camp?
Daylight savings is a retarded idea. Anyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows that when your blanket is too short, cutting a piece off at the bottom and sewing it on at the top won't help.
I think we should be on DST year round. I want my sunlight at the end of the work day instead of the beginning.
As someone who lives in Toronto, DST-in-winter would mean sunrise at around 9 AM, with a corresponding sunset at 6 PM. Given that most office workers get off at 5 PM, and many commutes take 30-60 minutes, it's not like you're gaining much.
And it's not like Toronto is that high up either (43N). Certainly most Canadian cities would have a worse DST-in-winter (Vancouver, Calgary, etc.), but even NYC and Chicago are in a similar situation.
Personally I'd rather have Standard-Time-always: in the summer, sunrise in the morning at 4:30 and sunset at 8:00 PM (versus 5:30 and 9) isn't so bad IMHO.
Well, now that the parent post has been modded to -1 and effectively invisible, your comment is now itself a moot point.
I'm from Arizona you insensitive clod!!
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Daylight Saving Time is incorrect.
If enough people use it that way, it's proper grammar. Same thing for the definition of words.
Don't loose your cool when someone says Daylight Savings Time.
Just play it fast and lose.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But is the question moot? http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/lists/20-best-saturday-night-live-political-sketches-w481607/the-question-is-moot-102084-w481905/
Daylight hours are shorter in the winter, yet "Daylight Saving Time" occurs during the summer months. So why are we "saving daylight" during the time of the year when we have the most daylight?
(The whole thing's stupid anyway, nobody can even remember why we started doing it...for the war effort, for the children who have to walk to school, for the electricity savings, for the farmers...the list of non-reasons goes on forever)
Not just grammatically incorrect, but monumentally stupid.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
English is a shite language. There are worse languages, but it's still shite.
Hey, it's what's on my TV when I wake up after I fall asleep during Adult Swim.
In the Idiocracy future.
And of course..."I gonna axe Bob to..." No you'll "ask" him.
"daylight saving time" is specified in the US law
United States Law - 15 U.S.C. 6(IX)(260-7)
Time zones and daylight saving time
United States Code
Title 15 - Commerce and Trade
Chapter 6 - Weights and Measures and Standard Time
Subchapter IX - Standard Time
Abbreviations are supposed to be capitalized. NASA, EDT, CDT, MDT, PDT, etc.
Maybe they wanted to have capitals savings writing.
Daylight Saving's Time.
Because its the time that belongs to Daylight Saving.
Or maybe people just didn't want it to sound like there were on some really weird Greenpeace protest to SAVE THE DAYLIGHT
Seriously? Calling somebody a Nazi because you're too fucking stupid and lazy, to write something that is readable without having to decipher the crap that you shat out of your head? And without guessing what you meant with half a dozen ambiguities?
No, we could not just not read it! Because we wouldn’t know that it is not worth reading, without having (at least started to) read it (and stumbled over your crap) in the first place!
Stop being such a lazy fuck, you moron! You're not at the home for disabled people!
The Olympiad is the time between two Olympic games!
Your bank savings account is exactly as grammatically incorrect as daylight savings time.
Or grammatically correct... From a certain viewpoint. You save multiple dollars multiple times. Multiple people save multiple minutes.
How about grass cuttings when you mow the lawn? Is it grammatically correct? I suspect the people that care about this stuff will come to their own conclusions long ago. The rest of us, at best, noted the difference between scientific and government publications compared with round-the-family-home usage and got on with our lives. Slow news day.
That is all.
Those of us with functioning brain cells already knew this. Granted, no one wants to know the correct way to say that, kinda like X Window, not X Windows. It's amazing the number of folks claiming to be competent tech types that don't seem to know these things.
The whole problem with daylight saving time could be eliminated if we just eliminate DST. It never made much sense to begin with and expanding the period in which we have to suffer with it only makes it worse. Something else the Republicans screwed up, but we're used to that. It's just a shame they have to muck stuff up for everybody. If they won't get rid of it, at the very least, we need to reduce the period where DST applies to where it actually might make some sense.
It is outdated, and not needed. When this nation was more rural, with farming being a mainstay, it MIGHT have made sense to "extend" the day, to allow farmers with kids in school, to get a little extra work after school, but, in today's world, it's a PAIN IN THE ASS to deal with. Clocks that have to be moved forward and backward (that don't automatically change), having small children that have to be up an hour early in the spring to meet the bus/get to school and on and on and on. The best reaction to daylight savings time, has to be attributed to an old Indian who said...only a white man could think you could cut the bottom off of a blanket, sew it onto the top and make the blanket longer. Leave the %#(^)@@! clocks alone. Either set them for DST, or leave them for regular time.
... Fucking Your Biological Clock Time (FYBCT)?
First, I’ll disagree with the mob: I thought that this article was interesting!
On the other hand, I was surprised by the original article disregarding any connection of DST with the concept of money savings:
“Remember the name by thinking that you are saving light (...) You’re unlikely to conflate the concept with money or bank accounts that way, probably because no one says “light is money.””
I’d never thought of DST as meaning that we are saving daylight, because we’re obviously not putting daylight in a safe deposit box, nor are we conserving daylight (producing or using less): we’re merely rescheduling it. On the other hand, one of the reasons for adopting DST (particularly, after the oil crisis of the 1970s) was to use less energy. Thus, it was hoped that DST would provide tangible savings (supplies and money). For that reason, “daylight-savings time” made sense to me: clocks were adjusted to achieve savings by way of the time-shifted daylight.
Nonetheless, I stand corrected!
Reckon you could add a couple more 'even's in there. We Even May Not Even Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet...
Not to brite, are yoo?
How about if we abolish the whole Daylight Savings Time change all together which actually saves nothing and obnoxiously disrupts our routines. That would be so much better. It is such a stupid, stupid idea!
But you project your self-hatred onto others, who tell you that maybe, you should not act mentally retarded, unless you are?
Yeah, real grown-up there, retard.
Around here, very young children have this thing, where when somebody criticizes them in any way, they go "mirrored" and "mirrored back" (in our language of course). Maybe "reflected" is a better term, I don't know. ... "a trillion" ... "infinite!" ... "infinite plus one!" ... "infinite times infinite" ... "always one more than you!".
Like kids going "a million!"
So is that what you are attempting here?
REALLY?? How old is your mind? Four?
Because if you'd have to actually stand in front of me in real life, and say that, with everybody around watching... you couldn't have found a worse person to say this to. XD
You didn't even attempt to bring any arguments against my arguments. So there isn't even anything to refute. You just said ... *nothing*.
So if you like empty statements and personal attacks so much, you will enjoy this comment! XD
Yes, I'm older than you, and use "XD". Which, in your emotionless psychopath culture, is very much frowned upon. So ... eat your shriveled black heart out, you emotionally dead psychopath. ^^
Day light saving time is something trivial that governments can screw around with without actually impacting much of anything. Thus they do.
Sure, people die due to the clock changes -- but until the ultra rich suffer it doesn't matter. We've too many peons and rich folk don't care apparently.
The world would be fine using UTC universally once people adjusted to the new times. Who cares if you wake up at 23:00. Really, it's just a number. Sunrise hasn't changed, the cows won't stop milking, the curtains don't fade. Iceland uses British time even though they are two hours shifted -- it doesn't matter.
One more whiny post with nothing to add? Talk about irrelevant, and redundant and repetitive, ad nauseam, too many times.