Last Updated on November 5, 2022
During Daylight Saving Time, we move our clocks ahead one hour, an idea first proposed in the 1780s by none other than Benjamin Franklin.
UPDATED — With Daylight Saving Time, there are two popular mnemonics — or memory aids — we rely on to help us remember how to change our clocks. We “fall back” in November, when we set the clock back one hour. We then “spring forward” in March, when we set the clock forward one hour.
The change technically takes place at 2 a.m. on the designated Sunday morning, a time presumably chosen to cause the least disruption. If you’re lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you look at it — to be awake at that designated hour, your clock either resets to 1 a.m. one minute after 1:59 a.m. or it jumps to 3 a.m.
Benjamin Franklin, as the story goes, suggested getting up an hour earlier back in 1784. The result, he said, would be the conservation of candles.
But it wasn’t until 1918 that the United States actually implemented it as a way to conserve on energy.
Back in March, possibly frustrated by losing that hour of sleep, the U.S. Senate approved a bill that would have made Daylight Saving Time permanent. That way, we’d would no longer have to worry with changing all of our clocks again.
But that bill stalled. So we continue the tradition.
Unfortunately, we also continue the tradition of mangling the name of the practice. People seem to insist on adding an extra S to the end of saving. The correct term is Daylight Saving Time, not savings. Remember: the whole point is we “save daylight.”
Daylight Saving Time hits a few weeks early this year. And with that schedule change comes the same old grammar problem.
Remember: hold the S! It’s Daylight Saving Time, not Savings, because it is “saving daylight.”
(And while you’re at it, please check the batteries in your smoke detectors.)
We don’t do the time change thing here in AZ. Too hot in the summer. Gotta have the most amount of daylight when it is coolest. Now the only problem is that I’m two hours behind the rest of my family, not one. De 😉
Put it is quite a savings to me! HA! I’m thrilled it is earlier!