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Comment by _nalply | Hacker News Reader

It's confusing. Once when I and my wife were tourists in USA, we experienced the switch to Daylight Time three times.

First in New York City where we missed our train. Then another time in Arizona. We suddenly discovered a Sunday that time was off but luckily it was of no importance. Then a last time again at home in Switzerland, where we missed again an appointment.

I am not sure about Arizona. Is it really true that states might have different daylight times?

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There is a West Wing episode "20 Hours in America" (it's 2 parts) where some characters are left behind by the campaign motorcade and try very unsuccessfully to make their way back to Washington. One of their many false starts involves a local difference in how daylight savings time is observed. They have a volunteer drive them to one of the later campaign stops, but this county has different time and they are an hour late.

The fun one is Indiana. Most of Indiana is in the Eastern time zone, the rest is in Central. The portion in the Eastern time zone (well, most of it) used to not observe DST, while that in the Central did. In 2006, it was changed so that everybody observed DST, although there's still quite a bit of unhappiness with the status quo and it could yet change again.

Arizona doesn't observe daylight savings.

Ah, this could explain the inconsistency we experienced.

However, when at the Grand canyon in Arizona, it seems that DST does get followed. This makes it difficult if you happen, like I did, to do a trip the weekend of DST shift where you start in Phoenix, AZ, go to the Grand canyon, then proceed west into a different time zone.

No wonder we were confused. Today I googled a bit and found this tidbit on: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/09/ari...

«The Navajo Reservation observes daylight saving time; the Hopi Reservation does not. The Navajo Reservation surrounds the Hopi Reservation, so if on Monday you drive from Flagstaff to Gallup through Tuba City and Ganado, you'll change time on four occasions.»

Grand Canyon National Park does not observe DST either, but as another comment noted, the Navajo Nation, which makes up a large part of the northeast corner of the state of Arizona, does.

It's actually called "Daylight Saving Time", but it's a common mistake.

There's a funny thing about "mistakes" in language. The more common they are, the less they're mistakes.

In which region is it common to call in Daylight Time? In New York I always hear it referred to as Daylight Savings Time.

"Daylight Time"? Nowhere that I've been. Mackal said that Arizona doesn't observe "daylight savings", and Osiris corrected them with "Daylight Saving Time". That's the difference that I was referring to. I hear "daylight savings" quite often.

Actually, the correct way to write it is "Daylight-Saving Time" [0]. I strongly suspect that had it been commonly written this way from the beginning, people would have understood how the phrase is constructed -- it means, the time that saves daylight -- and the whole "daylight savings" thing would never have gotten started. Consider that the hyphenated form also suggests a different pronunciation, with the primary stress on "day" and secondary stress on "sav", rather than the other way around which is how most people pronounce it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Compound_modifiers

You should correct the Wikipedia article[0]. The title and references within the article don't use the hyphenated version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

Funny you should mention! I tried [0]. (That's an old revision of the Talk page; the discussion has been removed.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Daylight_sav...

I copied what the article said – when in Rome do as Romans do.

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