ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

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

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

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".

analogous.

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."