Spring forward into some Daylight Saving Time trivia

THE WOODLANDS, TX – As we once again gird our loins – or at least our sleep cycles – to lose an hour’s sleep this weekend, here are some interesting tidbits about Daylight Saving Time

• What’s in a name? – Despite most of the civilized world pluralizing the word to “Savings,” the official name is “Daylight Saving Time” (no “s”).

• It’s not for everyone – Less than half of the countries in the world use DST today. The closer you get to the equator, the smaller the variations in the lengths of days, so many tropical nations don’t change their clocks.

• Franklin was joking – Yes, Benjamin Franklin proposed a version of DTS in a 1784 essay, but most people don’t realize he was being satirical. In the same missive, he also proposed rationing candles and firing cannons at dawn to wake up the late sleepers.

• Its popularity is dropping – Approximately half of the countries that have at one time or another “celebrated” DST have dropped the custom. Out of the 143 countries that at some point used DST, only 74 still mark the occasion in 2022.

• Why change in the middle of the night? – It’s caused many scratching of the collective head wondering why the leaps forward and back happen locally at two o’clock in the morning, forcing most people to set their clocks ahead the Saturday night before and then second-guess themselves the next morning. The reasoning for the pre-dawn change is the assumption that it’s the “sweet spot” between bars closing and early shift workers waking up.


Armed with these nuggets of information – and with the additional good news (robberies tend to go down when DST first kicks in) and bad news (studies indicate some fatal health issues might go hand-in-hand with it) – Woodlands Online encourages everyone to still enjoy as much of the weekend as possible, truncated as it might be.

(Photo by Photo by Maksim Chernyshev on Scopio)