I am driving myself crazy.
It all started this morning when I sent an e-mail announcement that an event would be held at 8 p.m. CST on Saturday. Then came the inevitable response:
"Shouldn't it be 8 p.m. CDT?"
I never have and probably never will understand this distinction. I understand the concept of "daylight savings time" in the sense that we get an extra hour of light during the spring/summer months through the processes of "springing forward" and "falling back."
Beyond that, I am clueless. In fact, it was just this morning that I realized I don't even know what the term "daylight savings time" means. I always thought "daylight savings time" was the time in which you were "saving" daylight -- meaning the dark time when you aren't getting much and saving it up for a happier, warmer time. Even though you are not actually "saving" anything, this at least made some logical sense in my admittedly twisted mind.
But now my admittedly twisted mind is blown. Apparently it is daylight savings time NOW, as in the time period in which we are using up daylight like George Hamilton on a bender. Does this make any sense? What daylight are we saving now? It seems like we're USING daylight now, not saving it. Does the D just stand for "daylight," or does it stand for "daylight savings?" Help!
I would feel incredibly stupid if it weren't for the fact that it seems like no one else can keep this straight, either. An unscientific survey of the innernets leads me to conclude that nearly half of people are getting this wrong right now. How is this helpful to anyone? The good news is, people know what you mean no matter what you write. No one is going to show up an hour early (Or would it be an hour late? Dammit!) for your event because you "S'd" when you should have "D'd."
David Prerau, author of "Seize the Daylight: The Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time," says daylight savings time has been confusing people for years. In the 1950s and '60s, he told NPR in March, there was no national law about daylight savings time. So any city or town could decide to have daylight savings time and could also decide when to start it and when to end it. This resulted in utterly bizarre situations like the bus trip along Route 2 from Moundsville, W.V., to Steubenville, Ohio, which was only 35 miles but required riders to change their watches seven times in order to keep the correct time as they passed through cities with different laws. The sheer idea of it makes my brain bleed.
I'm sure some really smart people like astrophysicists or something will disagree with me, but I'd like to propose, at least for journalism's sake, that we drop the middle letter and just say "CT," "ET," etc., year-round and scrap all this nonsense about D and S and whatnot.
Because I am dumb.
