ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

It's still early enough here for ME to be cranky, what's YOUR excuse?

He's a knob.

I rationalise this phenomenon on the basis that I can imagine Ned Flanders saying: "Okie-diddley-okie, it's time for some of them daylight savings!"

Do the British even say Daylight Saving Time, with or without the 's'? It's British Summer Time isn't it?

Yeah, though it seems to be creeping in, especially when we talk about the practice in a non-parochial, abstract context.

Also, computer OSes have popularised the phrase.

It's a bit of a confusing name, to be honest. Because the clock-shifting thing is sold to us on the clocks-going-back, October end of things, it being deemed important for farmers and schoolchildren to have more daylight in the morning. But that's when we come off daylight saving time (aka BST). So the daylight we want to save comes in the GMT section of the year.

Laurel OTM. In New York we still "stand on line," too, and everyone else can fuck off.

If "actor" has become gender-neutral (except for awards season), why can't waiter?

xpost Farmers - ha, reminds me of this Straight Dope gem:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_052.html

If "actor" has become gender-neutral (except for awards season), why can't waiter?

It can, it just hasn't.

He's a knob

no, a twat. get it right!

Also, computer OSes have popularised the phrase

YES, WITHOUT THE EXTRA S!

It's still early enough here for ME to be cranky, what's YOUR excuse?

an entire nation's grammatical idiocy, if what you say is right ... and i really, really don't want to believe you are, but i fear the worst :(

a cursory google reveals the odd occurrence of this particular craziness, but ... really, WTF? there's no logic there at all.

wow.

(fucking hell: to think that for all this time i've argued that the UK should adopt american english, too. this could change everything in a heartbeat :)

In New York we still "stand on line," too

that could almost -- almost -- have a grain of logic behind it. just about. i mean, you could sorta imagine a line.

but daylight savings time? jesus wept, america.

xxp Sure there is. You have savingS banks, money put away every month is called your savingS, and Daylight SavingS Time is a standard that allows you to accrue a bit more savings every day.

YOU WHAT?

10/10 for trying, though :)

if what you say is right

Hi, have we met?

heheheheh :)

I like "savings" time. It's nice for words to be just an edge away from their literal workmanlike meanings.

Alba: I always thought it was because you got extra hours of sunlight in the summer evening, when it matters. fuk one farmer.

dude. don't you fucking start. mind: from a sub who admits he takes a descriptive approach to grammar, i guess i should expect no better. pah.

No, look: if you found something that cost $100 on sale for $75, that would be a 25% savingS. When you come home at 6pm and it's light until 10 instead of until 9, that's an hour's savingS of daylight (you wouldn't say "an hour's saving").

It's not a perfect logical line but it's not hard to understand/justify the usage, either.

The page that I pasted that from says it would be more accurate and less confusing to call it "Daylight-Shifting Time" since no daylight is, after all, saved. It is just shifted to a different time of day.

On the airplane last Sunday the pilot made some chortling reference to a new (possibly EU-derived) phrase which is supposed to supplant BST as the official terminology, but I can't remember what it was.

Aha!

Western European Summer Time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

--> (Redirected from British Summer Time)

!!!

WEST

British pissing-down-again Sad-farmers high-time-to-emigrate Time?

Daylight shifting would be much better. "Daylight Saving" makes it sound like an amateurish sales trick.

y'know, like "actor" supposedly has now come to encompass the male and the female.

When The Guardian ran an obituary of Italian film producer (and one-time husband of Sophia Loren), an overzealous sub followed the style book to the letter, so that readers were treated to the information that in his early career he was "already a man with a good eye for pretty actors".

"This was one of those occasions when the word 'actresses' might have been used", pointed out the reader's editor in a subsequent clarification.

No, look: if you found something that cost $100 on sale for $75, that would be a 25% savingS

er, no? A saving of 25% = a 25% saving.

o. West Euro Savings Time, yey.

"British Summer Time was permanently in force during the Second World War from February 1940 until October 1945."

This seems a little weird.

xposts

if you found something that cost $100 on sale for $75, that would be a 25% savingS

no it wouldn't! it would be a 25% saving! singular!

we are not going to agree here. i mean, i'm right, but i'll magnanimously accept that i'm not going to convince you you're wrong ;)

Ledge, we would never say that, "a 25% saving". It's un-American. But thanks for the headS up.

Seems like genius to me xpost

Western European Summer Time

also: this can eat a bag of dicks repeatedly.

xpost: what, is "unamerican" now a synonym for "wrong"? :)

fuck! i meant "a synonym for right" ... fuck. bastard. think more carefully about post before posting, simon, you tit.

don't you mean "right"?

Maybe when "grimly 'Simon' fiendish" is a synonym for "a twitchy cnut".

it is!

don't you mean "right"?

YES THAT IS WHY I CORRECTED MYSELF, WITH MUCH SWEARING.

Maybe when "grimly 'Simon' fiendish" is a synonym for "a twitchy cnut"

oh, that's a given.

as for the war/BST thing ... there was a good reason for that, IIRC, but i'm wasting enough time here and really don't want to go and look it up :)

Well I doubt they would have done it on a whim!

Ahhh I feel much better: coffee downed, spleen vented. Time to get ready for that 11am meeting!

Well I doubt they would have done it on a whim!

you reckon?

Gives you more light for evening bombing raids on old Jerry? Also it saves energy -- there's more light during working hours.

Cos you know we couldn't bomb until after tea, right.

i'm sure it was agricultural, in some way.

So if it's Daylight Savings Time, then that means I can cash out all those extra hours of daylight and enjoy 180 straight hours of daylight this winter, right?

i think i've been saying 'daylight savings' all my life!
but i also apparently say things like "your guyses house is nice"
otherwise tho, grammar is PERFEVCT

PP that's also known as "moving to Iceland".

but i also apparently say things like "your guyses house is nice"

say more things like this; i'm intrigued!

if you found something that cost $100 on sale for $75, that would be a 25% savingS

That is pure mentalism.

Because the clock-shifting thing is sold to us on the clocks-going-back, October end of things, it being deemed important for farmers and schoolchildren to have more daylight in the morning.

Why don't farmers just get up later in the winter? And schools could start at different times? I don't really understand why we change the clocks at all.

this thread has been funny again recently

Umm I'd assumed "savings" had a standard definition on both sides of the Atlantic as more or less "stuff that has been saved" -- I keep my savings under my mattress, not in a savings account in a savings and loan