“… over whether the Senate should have passed the legislation at all. House officials say they’ve been deluged by voters with split opinions and warnings from sleep specialists who insist that adopting permanent standard time instead would be healthier, and congressional leaders admit they just don’t know what to do.”

 From “Clock runs out on efforts to make daylight saving time permanent” (WaPo).

Great! I wish there’d be more of this admitting that they just don’t know what to do. 

There… are regional differences in who would most benefit from permanent daylight saving time. Lawmakers in Southern states such as Florida argue it would maximize sunshine for their residents during the winter months — but some people who live in the northern United States or on the western edge of time zones, such as Indianapolis, would not see the sunrise on some winter days until after 9 a.m.

Yeah, I’ve already seen little kids waiting for the school bus in darkness, and it’s a month and a half before the solstice (the darkest day). So that would be 3 months of kids going to school during the nighttime. 

But Marco Rubio, of Florida, says: “This isn’t a partisan or regional issue, it is a commonsense issue.” He’s a co-author of the inanely named Sunshine Protection Act. No, Florida man, you are not offering sunshine… or “commonsense.” 

I’m blaming Rubio for invoking common sense when he’s lacking it, but the spelling “commonsense” is the responsibility of The Washington Post. It strikes me as wrong and I’m not used to seeing it that way, but I’m thinking about “commonplace” and “commonwealth” — how did those words congeal? By common use, I presume. But you can’t jump to close up the spaces between words. I just wrote “common use,” and it would be plainly wrong to attempt “commonuse.”

As you might imagine (if you read me very much), I went poking around in the OED, looking at words that begin with “common” and checking out the long entry on “common sense.” I won’t belabor that. I’ll just cherry-pick one thing, a quote from the 1974 novel by Alison Lurie, “The War Between the Tates” (about a married academic couple):

“He believed their courses to be composed of equal parts of common sense and nonsense—that is, of the already obvious and the probably false.”