Time Zone is a Region: what is the Word for 'currently using Daylight Savings' or not?

The current Wikipedia entry for 'Time zone' starts with:

A time zone is a region that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes.

Informally though people (and computers) tend to say things like:

"My current time zone is British Summer Time".

But actually the 'Time zone' is (in the short-term, barring politcal changes etc) actually a fixed region that doesn't change with the change of seasons.

Assuming my understanding and reasoning here is good: is there a more accurate word/phrase to replace 'time zone' in the sentence "My current timezone is ..."

Windows 7 does this by saying (to the effect of)

"My time zone is UTC, and daylight savings are currently in play".

What should people say ?

Solution 1:

An article that might interest you: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/united-kingdom-bst.html

According to them BST is a time zone.

So it would be correct to say "my current time zone is BST" during the summer and "my current time zone is GMT " in the winter.

Apparently a time zone does not have to apply all year long to a region to be considered as such.

Solution 2:

The Wikipedia article defines time zones as regions that observe the same time respectively (i.e., the same UTC offset). This is on a more or less fixed basis.

This attitude seems to be carried further (which Wikipedia, quite reasonably, does not do) in the introduction of temporary time zones: any region (or a set of regions) that observe the same UTC offset at any given time forms a time zone. For example, I am currently in CET time zone (Prague) but, according to the enhanced definitions of a time zone, in summer I will be in CEST.

Carrying this even further, I can stipulate that my garden is a time zone during Christmas Day, with a CET offset of +17 minutes. So each Christmas Day, while at home, I am in MyGarden time zone. Why not?

Maybe I'm oldfashioned, but I certainly prefer to have the offsets that define timezones fixed throughout the year. Daylight saving time is an established concept. Therefore, I would specify my local time as

I am in CET, and daylight saving time does not apply.

This phrasing casts the "daylight saving time" in the role of a switch, which may be a bit of a conceptual mismatch, but it is easy to understand. I even like the Windows phrasing, though informal, better than the idea of introducing temporary time zones.

(Apologies for being so subjective.)

Solution 3:

Normally to imply what you mean, there is actually a specific IANA named region that indicates whether a locale respects daylight savings time or not.

For example, in Canada the province of Saskatchewan does not implement Daylight Savings, so there is a differentiation between Central Time and Saskatchewan Time. The thing of it is that many people just don't know the official list of names thus making it hard to use them meaningfully in conversation. Ask most people what Dawson Creek time is and they'll be looking at a TV schedule for a long cancelled show. The fact that this small region of British Columbia raised a collective middle finger to Daylight Savings isn't widely known.

Further, When talking about the current time for your locale, one (as you mentioned) often has a different description for your current offset from what we used to call Greenwich Mean Time. I live in Ottawa, which is in Eastern Time.

It being winter it is now 11:37 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Come summer, I will express my current local time in Eastern Daylight Time, and if I specified "Standard" at that time it would imply a one-hour offset from the current time on my clock.

All in all though, its all a semantic mess where people will often ask you to clarify what you mean just to make sure that you are both in agreement on definitions. Fortunately it doesn't come up to often as most times you are just talking about the current local time.

The list of named zones used by your Windows (or database engine) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

And be especially warned against using abbreviations in any widely disseminated document.

EST means UTC-5 in north america, UTC-3 in Brazil, and UTC+10 in Australia

CST means UTC-6 in north america, UTC+930 in Australia, UTC+8 in China, and UTC-4 in Cuba