Is it Daylight Savings Time or Daylight-Saving Time or Daylight Shifting Time or something else?

by Blair Lovern

Welcome officially to whatever the hell it is.

The DMN calls it "Daylight-saving time." Actually, the AP calls it that and I'm guessing the DMN isn't overruling. The S-T also likes daylight-saving time. It's Daylight Saving Time in Canada, apparently.

Although, from another AP story comes this headline: "Daylight Savings: Time to spring forward." AH! Clever! Hide the ignorance with cleverness. I'm never above that kind of thing myself. I like this trophy for you, headline writer. It's not much but it represents important ideals we as a people must never forget.

The folks at one site prefer Daylight Shifting Time, although Daylight Saving Time will do. They offer this interpretation:

Can we get anal here?

Two things:

1.) Our site used "savings" and I don't care. Do you care? Who the hell cares? It's not incorrect. What's the difference between "a savings of $10" and "a savings of 60 minutes"? Now, I'm talking from a United States point of view. Some English speakers cringe at things like adding "s" to the end of a perfectly good word. Sometimes I'm an English cringer, sometimes I'm not. In this case, I'm not. Why? Because right there on page 52 of the US Energy Act of 2005 in glorious PDF are the bold words, "DAYLIGHT SAVINGS." But I will say that later in the act it is referred to only as "Daylight Saving Time." Now, just because some government-adoring writer is confusing people doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you want. But in this case, I think there is official precedent for doing whatever the hell you want.

2.) This one really eats me up. In baseball, a "save" is sometimes a noun, sometimes a verb. A variation of the word can be a participle, but I would guess that's not as common. You can't write, as was excerpted above, "Saving is used in the same way as saving a ball game" because then you'd have to allow something like, "Gagne's baseball savings were not bad in July, considering his arm was surgically replaced by his foot in June." An example of a participle is not "saving a ball game." To get a participle in baseball you'd have to say, "the saving pitcher."

And if we're not saving daylight (only shifting) why is saving a ball game the parallel example used here? Although, you can earn a save even though the game was never officially lost. Oh, but it might have been lost! Yeah, and every game starts off might being lost before you even play it. Stupid rule. I'm not just gonna rip the anal word shifting people.

I think we are indeed saving the daylight and not shifting it. We are saving it from the filthy, nasty dark. We're also saving it for me to be able to clean the pool after work, and we're saving it for our children because that's what everyone says for everything else.

Who is shifting the daylight? I'm not touching the daylight, I don't have a damn thing to do with where it goes. I don't know anyone who touches the daylight. Do you? It's just there for a while and then the earth turns and then someone else gets it for a while. That's all I know. Someone says, "Hey, loser, it's 3 a.m., not 2 a.m." And I say, OK, man, I've got people to see, documents to sign - just leave me alone. And in reality, I don't change my clocks at 2 a.m. I change them when I remember, and if that means living dangerously for like three hours, well screw you, U.S. Congress.

And what's wrong with mellifluously mellifluous things? Bo Diddley got it wrong when he sang "Who Do You Love?" So did Jessica Simpson with "Between You & I." I don't remember William Safire throwing rotten fruit at the Bo Diddley show I was at. Hey, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Is the IRS going to audit me this year? I do remember me and Saffy (oops, more IRS audits - although, that's what I call him) at the Jessica Simpson concert throwing lots of things at her, though. It was disgusting.

Man, all I know is stick to whatever DST grammar rule you want and when pressed hard by grammar hacks, make sure to back it up like Henry V and not his pansy king son who got kicked out of France.