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Comment by rsstack | Hacker News Reader

Many humans write EST in the summer.

I've been trying for years (by example) to popularize using PT, MT, CT, ET. Since it's always after a number ("Are you avail at 4ET?") there has never been one instance of confusion, and I save typing and avoid the small but real possibility of being interpreted too literally (suppose someone asks a computer "What time is 4:00 PM EST in London time" during the summer, and gets a 'technically correct' answer).

I don't have a similar answer for GMT/BST though.

This is the kind of imprecision that enrages me, though, because I am a resident of Arizona, and we observe MST all year long. It is currently MST. It is not MDT here. Therefore if we say, like, "it's 4:33pm MT" here and someone presumes that we are in DST, they would be wrong, and they would make the wrong conversion.

That is exactly why I am enraged by "EST"-users out of season. Because they are deliberately insensitive to people who are actually in Standard Time.

But it actually seems to be deeply ingrained into American-centric corporate culture. I had a WFH job in a large company that was nearly 100% WFH, and they consistently used "EST" to their detriment. And I kept challenging this apparently-unwritten policy, and they just said "it's always been this way". And this month I've even caught UPS using it: yeah, the United Parcel Service was quoting transit times for one of my parcels in terms of EST, which was utterly nonsensical to me.

It seems that people don't mean "Standard Time" anymore when they write "EST" but simply "EaStern Time" and it is implicitly understood by human communicators to definitely not mean Standard Time except when it does. I went around with Gemini LLM about this for awhile. I cannot explain why people would embrace an obviously incorrect acronym, but they really have.

I'm totally with you. Although if I moved to Arizona, I think instead of using "MST" 365 days a year and confusing all the people from other states during the 7 DST months, I would use "PT" in the summer and "MT" in the winter. Annoying to have to keep track of other people's dumb time changes (boy, do I hate DST), but it means you'd be doing the same twice-a-year change-up as we're wishing the "EST/PST" abusers did.

Honestly all this imprecision is because no standards body ever figured out a good way to turn the tzinfo codes ("America/Los_Angeles, America/Phoenix, America/Denver, America/Chicago, America/New_York"), which is what we are all actually trying to convey, into abbreviations. So we're stuck with identifiers like "-07:00" or "PDT" which have to be updated when the stupid time change happens.

This is how language works, things mean what people using language want it to mean. Not the more precise version you want it to mean.

No, when people misuse the language they are wrong. Their bad use does not become correct just because it's popular. Linguistic descriptivism is a nonsense idea.

It's literally a nonsense idea ;)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

I also only use the S variant in human conversation in my time zone.

I assure you that I am human and never, ever, write EDT in a conversation. My phone even tries to autocorrect it to EST

This is why I generally try to avoid it and just call it “Eastern“ or “Eastern US“ if talking with someone who might not be in the US.

Which is annoying.

Then you should change your behavior, because probably one day you will talk to someone in Arizona

Then they are wrong.

Prescriptivism is wrong.

I used to play an MMOG called "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates", and their servers were located in California. They used Pacific Time as their in-game clock and time zone. So they would call it "Pirate Time" and that easily fit into the mold of the "PT" abbreviation. It seemed perfect and foolproof to me.

However, the majority of the players on all the "oceans" (servers) converged on a different term for it. They called it "Game Time" or "GT" or "gt". I am unsure if this was a carry-over from common parlance in other games, or just something they felt more comfortable with using. I was not comfortable. People talking about "10:30 gt" was jarring and confusing to my neurospicy intellect. It surprised me, then annoyed me, then I had to mentally translate it back into "Pirate Time" and thus to "Pacific Time" as I was not in that time zone, and MST does not have a "constant offset" into Pacific Time.

So there was a case where the game admins prescribed, and adhered, to one standard term, and the players simply rejected it and supplied their own. So I do not know what "problem" was solved by that collective action, but mostly everyone seemed comfortable with it. It wasn't "wrong" or misleading per se because it was simply an invented acronym.

"EST" is wrong and it is not simply a preference to write the wrong timezone. If people like me, in perpetual MST, struggle to determine what offset is meant by "EST" then it's imprecise and misleading. We cannot merely say it's "descriptivist" and roll with it. Anyone who wants to avoid dealing with DST can simply write "ET" instead. Eastern Time. Easily interpreted, perennial, never wrong based on season or month.

But instead they've collectively insisted on co-opting an existing term and twisting it. Let's not be "descriptivist" in aiding and abetting misleading terms. Hopefully, if the U.S. completely bows out of Standard Time, something will change? I mean if we're permanently in DST, will corporations insist on sticking with their "EST" standards? That would be... bizarre.

> If people like me, in perpetual MST, struggle to determine what offset is meant by "EST" then it's imprecise and misleading. We cannot merely say it's "descriptivist" and roll with it.

We can though. Say EST out loud like it's a single word. It sounds like "east," as in "eastern." Next, pronounce all three letters: E S T. It still sounds like "east." This is why people use EST when they mean eastern. They aren't talking about daylight or standard time, they're talking about the time in New York.

Okay then, genius! Is it UTC-5, or UTC-4! Quick, calculate this across the cusp of Halloween and November 1st! Remember, you live in a region that never observes or switches to DST, so you have no idea when the switch actually happens!

No fair Googling anything! Good luck!

This is easy as shit: what time is it in New York?

No, no; I asked you, and your deadline to answer… has expired.

I answered lol, it's "the same time as it is in New York." This isn't hard to understand unless you're a machine with very rigid and prescribed rules I guess. It's 11:51am where I live, and I know by instinct, having lived here my whole life, that New York is one hour ahead of me, Denver is one hour behind me, and LA is two hours behind me. Ergo, it's 12:51pm EST.

I suppose if I lived in a timezone where we don't switch between daylight and standard time twice a year I might have to rub two of my braincells together to remember if they "spring ahead" or "fall back" at the moment, but the entropy generated by that extra bit of recall seems trivial.

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