ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

Farmers hate daylight savings time, but that's for another thread.

You are doing it, PP.

The thing, you're doing it.

Yeah, Alba, I know -- I'm just talking about Grimly's apparent rejection of all "savings."

P.S. Before y'all UKers get all sneery about the S you should probably consider that your S-less version is in desperate need of a hyphen -- if it's about saving daylight, then it's Daylight-Saving Time

we don't call it that

You know what time it is ... it's DAYLIGHT-SAVING TIME

I mean they

xpost - Which is, admittedly, way cooler, because someone can say "WHAT TIME IS IT?" and you can say "IT'S DAYLIGHT-SAVING TIME, KICK IT"

Time to save some daylight up in this piece.

hyphen: absolutely agree. this point was made at the very beginning and i don't dispute it.

"apparent rejection of all 'savings'" ... eh? not at all. in the right context -- eg the examples in your 4.49pm post -- it's perfect. beautiful. wonderful.

but "daylight savings time" remains nonsensical.

even "another thing coming" makes more sense ;)

My mind is now weighing up Trustee Savings Bank vs. Trustee-Saving Bank. I need to go home.

I am fairly sure it was never about saving trustees.

Grimly, try making a mental comparison with, say, "leavings."

"Leaving" is a gerund, "leavings" is a noun for what has been left.

Through rigorous daylight-saving activities, we will create a savings of daylight.

The typically USian part is very fancifully using the word "savings" to refer to something that isn't a discrete physical object. No surprise given our other colorful turns of phrase, though.

11/10 for trying, nabisco, but ... sorry, i'm just not buying it.

xpost ... yes, there is something fascinating going on here, though, not just about US/UK grammar but about how that grammar reflects US/UK thought processes/approaches. i'll come back to it once we've had our introductory lectures on language and psychology :)

I'll put that 11/10 straight in my Compliment Saving Account.

I'm being serious, you know how many American frontier tall tales/folk tales involve precisely that kind of linguistic play/stretching of the plausible? Ever heard of Pecos Bill and his bronco, Widowmaker? Or Paul Bunyan, or Davy Crocket? Take your pick; see also a TON of Native American stories in which conceptual things take physical form. It's no stretch at all to imagine the "daylight savings" being gleefully portrayed as, say, gold bricks that can be locked up until the hero of the story tricks them back from the villain.

laurel, i'm going to come back and pick your brains [1] about this in the future. that's quite, quite brilliant.

[1] ha! a plural in the idiomatic form. with no logic whatsoever. i give up.

i am going to start an online bank called DYLGHT SVNGS
where's your investment capital?
it's in the fucking sun, bitches!

i have confused myself with why i find this so funny

(and aside from "guyses" i just say a bunch of westcoast things that i am only half aware of, hm)

Do you say "janky"? Seattle, who is actually from SF, says it's an SF thing for "cheap, poorly made". I like it.

Seattle is a girl's name

You're a girl's name.

I've heard jank but not janky

http://www.womanspapers.com/community/jan03/seattle2.jpg

I think I've only seen "janky" in print, not in conversation. But I didn't hear "hinky" until college.

I say "janky" all the time, and I am Midwestern.

i have never heard janky! while 'dude' and 'awesome' transcend international borders, so many many words don't make it across

'dude i don't know man i totally deked outta that scene before it got all heavy'
has prob been said by me

"Leaving" is a gerund, "leavings" is a noun for what has been left.
Through rigorous daylight-saving activities, we will create a savings of daylight.

???
I get the 'leaving'-as-gerund part: Leaving your vegetables is lazy and bad for your health. I could imagine a noun 'leavings' for what has been left, e.g. He put his plate on the floor and let the dog eat his leavings, but I've never heard such a word - we would say 'leftovers'. But you could still never say 'a leavings'! The dog ate a leavings from my plate, but ignored a leavings which was on my wife's plate. That's so wrong.

Exactly the same with 'save':
Saving money is a good idea in the long run. = ok
The cost of the new kitchen ate into his savings. = ok
He put some money away each month and built up a savings. = wrong, wrong, wrong!

But you could still never say 'a leavings'!

It could work. 'An innings' is perfectly OK, over here at least :)

NBS, you would never say "a leavings" because LEAVINGS IS PLURAL. You'd never say "a tomatoes" either.

So is it "less savings" or "fewer savings"?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Less, of course. 25% is less of a savings than 50%.

Ah.

fewer.

but i can totally understand why laurel (and presumably nabisco) would say "less".

(and presumably several million other americans, natch.)

If you're talking about savings in a bank, then surely "less". You don't count such savings one by one.

i do. "one, two, thr ... oh. two."

less savings fine less of a savings mental-sounding

NBS, you would never say "a leavings" because LEAVINGS IS PLURAL. You'd never say "a tomatoes" either.

That's exactly my point. That's why you would never say "a savings". Nabisco suggested 'leavings' and 'savings' had the same properties.

I have read an argument for using 'less' with percentages, I think something to do with it expressing a quantity of a whole. Less than 10% of universities, not fewer than 10% of universities.

I think either of those could be all right - in the first one, the 'less' applies to the percentage, and in the second it is 'fewer' universities. But, yes, footballers would not be allowed to give 'fewer than 110%' though it'd be funny if one said that.

your guyes' savingses' grammar theories are less convincing than a few things

I've no idea what anyone's on about anymore.

"Fewer than 110%" makes no sense, but "fewer than 10% of universities" does, because although we might not know it, 10% of universities is a fixed, definite number, so actually we're saying "fewer than 35" or whatever.

"A savings" is clearly madness but if British English has similar plural-sounding singulars then perhaps that's madness too.

If you think it's all got incomprehensible you've got another thing coming.

"Fewer than half of all Americans support the Iraq war"

"Less than half of all Americans support the Iraq war"

Fewer sounds a bit strange to me. Which makes me think it shouldn't be used with percentages either.

Ahhh a little help from the American Heritage Dict:

1. savings Money saved: a bank account for savings.
2. savings (used with a sing. verb) Usage Problem An amount of money saved: a rebate that yielded a savings of $50.

Usage Note: Traditionalists state that one should use the form a saving when referring to an amount of money that is saved. Indeed, that is the form English speakers outside of the United States normally use. In the United States the plural form a savings is widely used with a singular verb (as in A savings of $50 is most welcome); nonetheless, 57 percent of the Usage Panel find it unacceptable.