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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.
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!
Hey, Cliff Clavin, glad to see you off the bar stool and out on the W's.
Some settling may occur during posting.
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
What's the grammatically correct emoji to express daylight saving time?
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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.
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.
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 Savings has a bit of twang to it, as in, "Wez iz savings sum daylight"
--
"Time Out!" - Mom
Let's just keep it all year and stop changing the time.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Mein Obergrammerfuhrer.
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!
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
I'm a professional linguist, and here's my message to the author: go fuck yourself
Some achievement being a professional linguist at the age of twelve!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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.
There, fixed that for you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
... because we were all just SO *confused* about it!
I can sleep easy now, am totally plussed.
and this seems pretty nitpicky to me.
This has appeared in newspapers (look that up) pretty much every year since I've been able to read.
3 years?
Grammer Knotsees kan eet et!
Table-ized A.I.
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.
He's obviously a well-versed legal professional as well, having issued a response in the nature of Arkell vs Pressdram.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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!"
No, fuck Daylight standard time.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
He may be quite cunning.
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.
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?
I'm from Arizona you insensitive clod!!
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
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/
Fuckwit Standard Time?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Not just grammatically incorrect, but monumentally stupid.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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
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.
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!
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!