I'm Still Calling It Daylight "Savings"

Nice try, though.

This Sunday, November 6, a lot of us in North America and Europe will set our clocks back one hour in the name of maximizing sunlight time as the seasons change. What do you call this practice?

Daylight Savings? Me too.

The correct name for the custom is Daylight Saving Time—no s at the end of Saving—and I’m noticing a lot of publications’ style guides must have been updated this year, because a lot more headlines are using the official title. A simple Google search for the words “daylight savings” (with the s) yields plenty of evidence: the three top SEO-trawly results all say saving.

“Daylight Saving Time 2016 ends,” says first result Patch.com. “Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday,” coos MarketWatch. “Fall back: Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday,” announces Fox31 Denver. These aren’t the New York Times, folks. They could be more colloquial with their copy if they wanted to. But it seems like everyone, in unison, decided that this was the year they were gonna be on the right side of Daylight Savings, and tbh I’m not here for it.

Daylight Saving Time sounds like time we’ve set aside to focus on saving our daylight. Daylight Savings Time sounds like a fun sale where I get more day for my buck just by showing up. And that’s kind of the idea here, right? “We all just did an arbitrary behavior, but it’s for generally good reasons?” Here’s the thing: time is a construct. We made it up. Minutes, seconds, all of it. They’re words for ideas that help us wrap our heads around what’s happening while we’re alive, so in that sense time is very real, but it’s not so real that we can’t make rules up as we go along — like Daylight Savings. Bearing that in mind, who cares what we call it? I could call it Moon Holiday if I wanted to and none of you could stop me. I won’t, but that’s a choice I’m making. I don’t need my trash internet news outlets to suddenly treat this thing with reverence.

As with the gif/jif debate people love to evoke during a slow conversation, I am not interested in the correct answer in this scenario. I’m not here to be correct. I’m here to live my life and save some daylight during the cold winter months, and Daylight Savings rolls off the tongue and the eyes. Is this how people who call it Nordstom’s feel? Cause I think I understand now.

Wikipedia’s own informational daylight map has confused language. It’s Daylight saving in the title and daylight savings in the key:

It’s almost… as if… the colloquial name for the phenomenon was easier for the author to access than the official one.

“Christine,” you must be thinking. “Is this really the hill you want to die on?” And honestly, yes. It is. I will bleed out on the side of this Revolutionary War hillock, shaking my bayonet in defense of my right to keep being wrong online. And you can too, if you’d like.