Day 5, 6 or whatever of Daylight Savings Time 2017, and I've yet to get a decent night's sleep. But it's all good, since we endure this madness for the children or the farmers or to save energy or some other noble cause to be sure. Anyway, it gives me a chance to look at lexical variation for different times of the day, which I haven't done since looking at "clock" in popular music and quarter forms for telling time in the Rocky Mountains.

I begin by presenting responses to a prompt by fieldworkers of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies for terms that informants used to describe the sun passing below the horizon at the end of the day.

Fig. 1: Variants of "sunset" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated in Figure 1, the most common response was sunset (n=41) followed by a secondary variant, sundown (n=12). The remaining 5 response types occur only 9 times total.

Subsequent posts will take a look at variants of "sunrise" in the collection, and then a search for both sets of terms in popular music.

Donate