Rob Seaman wrote:
Contrarily, in Britain you have chosen to call your civil standard time "Greenwich Mean Time" and your civil daylight saving time "British Summer Time", rather than (for instance) British Standard Time and British Daylight Time. ... Perhaps folks can comment on international usage broader than my parochial fixation on the United States?
There *was* such a thing as British Standard Time between 1968 and 1971, when Britain experimented with keeping its clocks permanently one hour ahead of GMT all year round. This was called British Standard Time, even in the summer. The purpose of the experiment, apparently, was to determine whether there was any commercial advantage in keeping British clocks in synch with those of our European neighbours. This was before Britain was a member of the European Common Market. The experiment was abandoned in October 1971, when the clocks were put back to Greenwich Mean Time, and we have kept daylight saving time each summer since then. The dates of the start and end of daylight saving time were set by Parliament each year, until the early 1990s, when the start/end dates were harmonised across the European Union. It's true that the GMT/BST naming scheme does not conform to the Standard Time/Daylight Time pattern, but GMT is equivalent to Western European Standard Time and BST to Western European Daylight Time. However, it would be a brave and foolhardy M.P. who proposed in Parliament that the names GMT and BST should be abolished and replaced by WEST/WEDT. That would generate a far greater furore in British politics than any discussion about leap seconds :-) David Harper -- Dr David Harper Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, England Tel: 01223 834244 Fax: 494919 http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Users/adh/
