Daylight Savings Time... Or Is It Saving Time?

When I looked it up once, years ago, I was shocked.

Daylight Saving Time? Surely that must be wrong, I thought. Everybody says Daylight Savings Time. But nope. Check any dictionary you want. If you write or say Daylight Savings Time, technically you are in error.

Right or Wrong?

I can't think of any other phrase in English that is so consistently "wrongly" used. I mean, seriously, I never, literally never, hear anybody say Saving Time. If someone said that, it would sound wrong.

It begs the question: Which version is really "wrong"? If society in general has settled on Daylight Savings Time, shouldn't we just change the darn thing already? There's nothing grammatically wrong with it. It's just not what DST's inventors picked when they coined the phrase more than 100 years ago.

I admit, this one has been nagging at me for years. Saving Time sounds so wrong that I am always tempted to commit a professional proofreader's mortal sin: seeing an error and not fixing it, just because I like it better the other way.

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive

It's a classic argument. Should dictionaries be descriptive (that is, go with the flow and adjust their entries according to how people really communicate), or prescriptive (that is, lay down the law, and popular variations be damned)?

All I know is, if my name were Webster, I'd be having a discussion with my buddy Merriam to make a change to next year's edition.