No, it’s “Daylight Savings/Daylight Saving”

It’s that time of the year again. But wait, did you just say “Daylight Savings”? It’s “Daylight Saving”!

It’s “Daylight Saving” because we’re saving daylight. You can’t have a plural of a verb. Do you go dog walkings? Do you dinner cookings? Are you Deutsch sprechen? Nein! It’s “Daylight Saving”.

It becomes clear what to call it when we look at the term’s etymology. We “save” daylight while the days are getting longer, otherwise we’ll run out as the days get shorter towards winter. We store daylight up in a bank, like in a savings account. Therefore, it’s “daylight savings” during winter.

The origin of daylight savings time was the Venetian agrarian period, some 1,000-5,000 years ago. Farmers, who wanted to get to the bank early to deposit or withdraw money from their savings account, would be frustrated that they’d have to tend the fields at the same time the banks were open. To accommodate their demands, banks in Venice Beach would adjust their schedule to be open during daylight hours, when it was too hot to be outside farming, anyway. Savings in daylight = daylight savings.

Other people heard and its popularity grew. Without daylight savings, in winter, dawn would come really late, and the evening would be really early. People needed a way for it to be brighter for longer through magic or trickery. Many were frustrated that at night they’d have to burn things to be able to see or stay warm, and sick of waking up in the dark, like a farmer trying to get to the bank. So the obvious solution was to get rid of night.

It wasn’t just everyday folk who would benefit from messing with the clock at arbitrary times. Landowners didn’t want peasants to realise that they were sacrificing the majority of their waking hours for their masters’ wealth, so they devised a scheme to tweak the clock slightly in the hope that people would trade the pain of sleeping slightly less for the illusion of more time in the light with their loved ones. This tradition of temporal enslavement has continued in today’s economy.

When do we start to save daylight? The spring and autumn equinoxes fall on roughly the 21st of March and September, but we enable daylight saving a few weeks later, on a Sunday, when we think most people won’t notice, assuming people don’t do anything according to a schedule on Sunday, or that nothing will happen on the Monday afterward.

And where do the savings go? It seems confusing at first, because all we perceive is that every half a year, we feel disoriented. But over the years, this feeling adds up, until on leap years we withdraw all our banked time on the 29th of February, creating a whole new day.

Not everyone is in favour of daylight savingses, of course.

One of the strongest lobby groups against daylight saving is those original pesky farmers, who now bank online. You might think, as I did, that cows, like humans and other drones, produce milk at regular daily intervals and that adjusting the clock would change their schedule. This is a common myth.

In reality, cows, similar to other animals such as playpuses and wolverines, are pretty stupid and can’t even read clocks, and so just go by sunlight. They actually don’t care what time it is, unlike bankers. This is why dogs always think it’s a suitable time for a morning snack of peanut butter or for some evening cheese, regardless of the time of day.

Not everywhere observes daylight saving. In Australia, the states that are generally anti-immigration, anti-renewables, and against indigenous rights do not support daylight saving. This creates an interesting dilemma for Australian inhabitants who have to choose between observing daylight savings and being a recalcitrant, uneducated racist.

In the US, most states DO observe it, but they’re not happy about it. In the comedy series Veep, getting rid of daylight saving was part of Jon H Ryan’s policy platform, along with eliminating “Muslim” math and vaccinations. In modern times, abandoning daylight savings was proposed by Donald Trump, whose administration gutted the Department of Education and fired a quarter of the CDC. Perhaps certain politicians prefer the cover of darkness.

Some other similarly large countries don’t observe daylight time. Mexico, which calls daylight saving horario de verano, which sounds lovely, abandoned it everywhere in 2022 other than in Baja California, where people try not to confuse American tourists. Russia has 11 time zones, but ditched daylight savings in 2014, after trying it for five years and condemning it to their long list of failed experiments, including communism, various invasions, and fur hats for men.

China’s government maintains a vice-like grip on its people, and imposes not only no changes for saving daylight, but a single time zone for the whole country! Some people get up in darkness, some sleep in the light, but whatever. Life goes on, according to the Central Propaganda Department.

Another point of confusion is when daylight savings are (no, not “is”, grammar police). Is it during summer or winter? In other parts of the world, it’s known as “daylight time,” which still doesn’t help because if it weren’t daylight, I probably wouldn’t be awake and thinking about whether it was daylight time or not. Let’s see… in the summer, we have lots of daylight, so we don’t need to save it… in winter, we do need to save it, but is there enough to save? I don’t know.

So what are we going to do with it? My suggestion is to go back to the Roman way of dealing with time. In Roman timekeeping, daylight was divided into twelve, no matter how long or short the day was. If it’s dark, who cares what time it is? Just go to bed. The only modifications I’d make would be to subtract two hours, as it’s weird to have the same number of hours in a day as eggs in a carton, and to allocate the two left over to praising Zeus and wrestling handsome men.

I also have been partial to attempts to change to universal “metric time”. But they never caught on, probably because the metric system is for nerds.

In summary, I hate daylight saving, daylights savingses, daylight time, and every other variant, but I’m not a racist, an idiot, or a nerd, so I guess I’ll stick with it… for now.