[LEAPSECS] Following an open source process

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <C6363E51-0EFC-4D24-86E1-58868D148FD5 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:


>> The civil day starts and stops whenever the most powerful civil

>> authorities for a given locality decide it should do so.

>

>"Civil day" - singular - certainly cannot mean "multitudinous local

>timekeeping rules".


"Civil day" are two words.  Words have whatever meanings (NB: plural)
homo sapiens give them.  Neither in theory, nor in practice is there
any indication of limitations to what words can mean, nor any
indication that such meanings has any tendency to stay fixed in time.

Some languages, amongst them Danish, have two different words for
"day" ("dag") and "24 hour from midnight to midnight" ("døgn"),
but english notably does not.

With the english word "day" covering both meanings, I would be
disinclined to declare by fiat what a phrase like "civil day" can
or cannot mean.

The *typical* contemporary meaning of "civil day" is "a 24 hour
period from midnight to midnight", with midnight being tacitly
understood as local time, but you can find interesting legally
binding variations in the law of many countries and in salary
calculations for personel on ships, trains and planes.

In former days, "civil day" certainly had other meanings, for
instance many countries in northern Europe had the legal notion of
"civil day" meaning such things as "the time interval where the sun
is above six degrees below the horizon", (Danish: "Borgerligt
Tusmørke") typically used to restrict trading hours for agricultural
markets and when travellers could be admitted to taverns or through
the city gates.

The only thing I can deduce from your claim above, is that you
should consider adding "become pope" to your career plan, you
certainly have the "make unfounded but definitive sounding
pronouncements" bit of the job down pat.

And if you really belive you know "The One True Meaning[TM]" of
"civil day", you should start out by editing Wikipedia, which says:

	For civil purposes a common clock time has been defined for
	an entire region based on the mean local solar time at some
	central meridian. Such time zones began to be adopted about
	the middle of the 19th century when railroads with regular
	schedules came into use, with most major countries having
	adopted them by 1929. For the whole world, 40 such time
	zones are now in use. The main one is "world time" or
	Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

	The present common convention has the civil day starting
	at midnight, which is near the time of the lower culmination
	of the mean Sun on the central meridian of the time zone.
	A day is commonly divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes of
	60 seconds each.

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day#Civil_day

And when you are done with that, you'll need to update pretty much
any dictionary, encyclopedia or lexicon published in the last 50
to 100 years.

Which may actually be the crux of the matter:  As Wikipedia says,
the meaning have drifted over time.

Maybe you are not wrong, maybe you are just running 100 years late ?

Poul-Henning

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