ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

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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.

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:07 (sixteen years ago) link

YOU WHAT?

10/10 for trying, though :)

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:08 (sixteen years ago) link

if what you say is right

Hi, have we met?

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:09 (sixteen years ago) link

heheheheh :)

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:09 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:10 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:11 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:13 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:14 (sixteen years ago) link

Aha!

Western European Summer Time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

--> (Redirected from British Summer Time)

!!!

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:15 (sixteen years ago) link

WEST

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:15 (sixteen years ago) link

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

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:16 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

Alba, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:16 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

ledge, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:16 (sixteen years ago) link

o. West Euro Savings Time, yey.

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:17 (sixteen years ago) link

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

This seems a little weird.

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:18 (sixteen years ago) link

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 ;)

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:18 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:18 (sixteen years ago) link

Seems like genius to me xpost

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link

Western European Summer Time

also: this can eat a bag of dicks repeatedly.

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

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link

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

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:20 (sixteen years ago) link

don't you mean "right"?

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:21 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:21 (sixteen years ago) link

it is!

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:22 (sixteen years ago) link

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 :)

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:22 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:23 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Laurel, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:23 (sixteen years ago) link

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

you reckon?

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:24 (sixteen years ago) link

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

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:25 (sixteen years ago) link

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

stet, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:25 (sixteen years ago) link

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

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 14:27 (sixteen years ago) link

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?

Pleasant Plains, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 15:00 (sixteen years ago) link

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

rrrobyn, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 15:50 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 15:54 (sixteen years ago) link

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

say more things like this; i'm intrigued!

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:01 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

Nasty, Brutish & Short, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:04 (sixteen years ago) link

this thread has been funny again recently

RJG, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:20 (sixteen years ago) link

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

nabisco, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:49 (sixteen years ago) link

Results 1 - 10 of about 58,500 for "life savings" site:.uk. (0.27 seconds)

jaymc, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:54 (sixteen years ago) link

Yes nabisco, but we think of Daylight Saving as an explanation of what the time change is intended to achieve, not a compound noun (is that the right term?) analagous to "lifetime savings".

Alba, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:54 (sixteen years ago) link

analogous.

Alba, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 16:55 (sixteen years ago) link

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

Pleasant Plains, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:01 (sixteen years ago) link

You are doing it, PP.

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:02 (sixteen years ago) link

The thing, you're doing it.

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:02 (sixteen years ago) link

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

nabisco, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:03 (sixteen years ago) link

we don't call it that

RJG, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:04 (sixteen years ago) link

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

n/a, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:04 (sixteen years ago) link

I mean they

RJG, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:05 (sixteen years ago) link

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"

nabisco, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:05 (sixteen years ago) link

Time to save some daylight up in this piece.

jaymc, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:07 (sixteen years ago) link

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.

grimly fiendish, Wednesday, 31 October 2007 17:09 (sixteen years ago) link


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