The End of Summer Time
30 October 2005
In German, Daylight Savings Time is called “Sommerzeit,” or Summer Time. However, when Daylight Savings Time ended the first year that I lived here I did not know this.
By the last weekend in October of that first year I had a very basic grasp on the language and so when I happened across a headline that read “The end of Summer Time,” I translated it to, “The end of summertime.” This led me to wonder why such a headline appeared a month after autumn had officially begun. It was only when I showed the headline to A. that I found out that the headline actually meant, “The end of Daylight Savings Time!”
Disclaimer: I also now know that in other parts of the English-speaking world Daylight Savings Time is called Summer Time, but in the part of America that I come from it is never referred to that way. Hence the reason that I had no idea that Summer Time could be another term for Daylight Savings Time.
