No, I didn’t misspell the title to this post. Just read on.
This past Saturday I kept wrestling with whether or not this was the week that we all roll back our clocks. It seemed to me that we always changed our clocks on the last Saturday of October, making last Saturday the day in question.
I had heard conflicting reports of friends who were rolling their clocks back and others who were still at the same time. I was confused until I read this article. It explained that a new law was in effect in the United States this year. It seems President Bush signed a new bill back in 2005 that pushed Daylight Saving Time back a week. (That would explain the conflicting reports from friends…some were from Europe which still observe the original date.) This change is hoped to help conserve energy and whatnot. Whatever. It just means we have to wait another week to get that extra hour of sleep.
So while at the website, I decided to read around a bit and see what else the site had to say about DST. Well, it seems we all have been saying it wrong. Most of us have referred to it as Daylight Savings Time. This is not grammatically correct. It is Daylight Saving Time–no ’s.’
Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Because of this, it would be more accurate to refer to DST as daylight-saving time. Similar examples would be a mind-expanding book or a man-eating tiger. Saving is used in the same way as saving a ball game, rather than as a savings account.
Nevertheless, many people feel the word savings (with an ’s’) flows more mellifluously off the tongue. Daylight Savings Time is also in common usage and can be found in dictionaries.
Adding to the confusion is that the phrase Daylight Saving Time is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. Daylight Shifting Time would be better, but it is not as politically desirable.
So that’s it. Have a happy Daylight Savings Time, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight-Saving Time, and Daylight Shifting Time on Saturday.