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It isn't uncommon people use Eastern Standard Time/EST, Mountain Standard Time/MST and Central Standard Time/CST when daylight savings is observed during the date they're referring to, so they actually mean Eastern Daylight Time/EDT, Mountain Daylight Time/MDT, and Central Daylight Time/CDT. Most people and indeed most online timezone conversion tools automatically correct this so it doesn't generally cause too much confusion. The general suggestion to be technically correct and ensure no possible confusion but without having to remember to change depending on whether DST is observed or not is to just say ET/Eastern Time, Mountain Time/MT, Central Time/CT all the time. This got me wondering, it is the general taken that technically ET, MT, CT etc always mean EST/EDT, MST/MDT, CST/CDT based solely on whether DST is observed in that timezone regardless of whether it's observed in the area? So for example, if someone in Arizona MT during DST, they're supposed to be referring to MDT even if it's probably not observed in their area? Nil Einne (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've run into commentary about the lack of precision before the 20th century several times now, so it's a pattern of some kind and I'm trying to understand it.

I first ran into it while researching the history of recipes. According to various sources, before the 20th century, recipes were poorly defined, lacked exact measurements, and often did not define words and terms in such a way that after several centuries or so, food historians had trouble reconstructing certain recipes because there was little record of what the uniquely named ingredient or instruction meant or tried to convey. Both the ingredients, and in some cases, the measurements that were implied, had been lost to time.

The second example has to do with literature before the 20th century, mostly journalism and some historical accounts. They seemed to care little for getting dates correct, and in some cases talked around the dates for some reason. For example, I was just trying to add a citation for the gravestone donated by the Bohemian Club (BC) to the final resting place of Jules Tavernier. When I looked at the source written by the BC, it says things like "It was in this year that a monument was placed over the grave". There is no year listed anywhere, however, if you closely read the text, you have to scroll several pages up to put together and reconstruct the year in your head based on several pointers. This all seems very odd to me.

So the question: why is there a general lack of precisionism and accuracy before the 20th century? Viriditas (talk) 23:25, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do any of these Findagrave entries pertain to your particular Jules Tavernier?[1] The cause there I would say is "sloppy writing". As to the general question, spelling of names and other words prior to the 20th century is often atrocious. Governmental and other needs probably drove more rigorous spelling standards. As to recipes and such, and as with many things, the information was known at the time, and maybe no one felt the need for greater precision because they somehow thought it would last forever. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:39, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's right, but what I'm getting at is why did people several centuries ago take this approach? I realize, of course, that there's several different interpretations and explanations, perhaps with some of them converging in their explanations. For example, there's the popular explanation having to do with the history of timekeeping, forcing people to become more and more precise over the years as timekeeping exerted its influence more and more in every aspect of their lives. But that doesn't explain the problem food historians have with older kinds of recipe making. I first ran into this when I reviewed criticism about Lautrec's recipes, many of which did not include exact measurements (which I believe were added into later editions of his cookbook after his death). Recently, I heard a podcast about very old recipes which were giving historians a hard time because the names of the ingredients were no longer recognized. Then, while reading about late 19th century art, I ran across several more modern critics who said they were frustrated by contemporaneous accounts of art from that time as they often failed to convey the essential information needed. Which brings me to my point: did people several centuries ago have an altogether different conception and philosophy of time and history? Why not write, "In the year 1890, the monument was placed over the grave." Why was that so difficult or impossible for the writers of that time to do? Was it seen as too proletarian or low class to specify an exact time and place for something? Similarly, why was it difficult for culinary specialists to specify an exact measurement in their recipe? Was that seen as giving away too much knowledge? Finally, there's the aspects of carelessness in 19th century journalism, as if they didn't really care about the notion of facts or accuracy. Viriditas (talk) 23:57, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or that someone reading it generations later would wonder about it. You could call that "living in the present." So which Tavernier are you talking about? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:01, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jules, the painter, but I'm offering that as an example, not the subject of this discussion. You can see the source I was talking about here.[2] The source is about the time from 1890 to 1891 (as specified in the introduction), but neither mentions the month (December) day (21) or year (1890) in regards to the monument. Viriditas (talk) 00:07, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, but you didn't link it initially, because you knew exactly who you were talking about. This is how information gets lost over time! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:10, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My mum was regarded as a champion cook in her community ifrom the 1940s through to the 1990s. There were many ingredients she hardly ever measured at all. She would just pick up the container and pour until she felt the amount was right. It almost always was. She could NOT have written precise amounts if asked. HiLo48 (talk) 00:43, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I am learning about this. Viriditas (talk) 00:53, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Viriditas It's also to do with the loss of intuitive and learned technical skills and the rise of automation, which requires far more precision than was previously necessary. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:44, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also today, recipes are often woefully imprecise. I read, "Ingredients: ... two tomatoes". The weight of tomatoes I can buy at the market (not considering cherry tomatoes) ranges by an order of magnitude, as does that of apples, cucumbers, eggplants, potatoes, zucchini, you name it. Fortunately, it usually does not really matter. Precision in 19th-century recipes was only specified to the extent that it was useful. The typical 19th-century kitchen didn't have weighing scales, and precision that is unachievable with the available means is useless.

You need high-precision engineering to make high-precision measuring instruments, but you can't achieve high-precision engineering without high-precision measuring instruments. Progress in affordable precision has been gradual. The problem of high-precision mechanical engineering of gearwheels was part of why Charles Babbage never completed his difference engine – he could not get the precision required for the gearwheels to operate with very low friction. But his renown in improving precision engineering was such that apprentices came from Europe to his workshop to learn the craft from the master.  ​‑‑Lambiam 10:01, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible that Babbage's tolerances were too exact and that his design was over-engineered. However, a Swedish printer named Georg Schütz and his son Edwin did actually succeed in building a working Difference Engine with lesser tolerances in 1853. Two were made; one was sold to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, NY in 1858 (the director was fired for the expense): the other was sold to the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths in Somerset House, London.

• Raymond C. Archibald. "P. G. Scheutz, publicist, author, scientific mechanician, and Edvard Scheutz, engineer—biography and bibliography".Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, Vol. 2, issue 18: pp 238–245, April 1947. CODEN. MTTCAS. American Mathematical Society

• So now, in the age of Trump, we live in a world of precision? Perhaps better no numbers than fake numbers. Johnbod (talk) 13:41, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Figures don't lie, but liars do figure." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:24, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• What's important to us was not necessarily so to people back then. And vice-versa. Take the case of birth dates. They were frequently not recorded, simply because they were considered trivial and irrelevant compared to the date of the child's baptism/christening. Now, baptisms were typically done a day or two after the birth, but not always. Sometimes there was a year or more between them. The baptism date was always recorded; the birth date, not so much. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:55, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's not it at all! Actual birthdays were not "considered trivial and irrelevant compared to the date of the child's baptism/christening", but regarded much as we do now. But the baptism was always (by law in most places) written down in the parish register which, barring accidents, still survives in most cases, while the family memory has vanished. Johnbod (talk) 13:41, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I feel like we've had this discussion before! Thanks for the reminder. Viriditas (talk) 01:07, 13 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some people are simply lazy and imprecise. A glance at the refs and bibliography of almost any WP page (including FAs and GAs) will reveal a disdain for accuracy. On a slightly different precision track than time and history: Weights and measures were in vast disarray for a very long time. In Britain, the Second Report of the Commissioners Appointed by His Majesty to consider the subject of weights and measures (1820), contains a page of different customary acres and nearly two pages of barrels, four fothers, fourteen hundredweights, and 24 different tons, all depending on what you were measuring and where. Scientists have become more and more able to define quantities with increasing precision, but it took most of the 19th century and beyond into the 20th. The rapid progress of the railways in Britain in the 1840s made it necessary to publish timetables based on a standard time, Railway time, for example Bradshaw's. History of the metre shows that the metre was redefined in 1889. Invar was only invented in 1920. The measurement of time is still under consideration. Joseph Whitworth worked out how to make a very accurate Surface plate, essential for making lathes; is thought to have come up with the thou, and invented British Standard Whitworth in 1841, the world's first national screw thread standard. Dmitri Mendeleev published the first modern periodic table in 1869; William Ramsay discoverd the noble gases from 1894, which fill a large and unexpected gap in the periodic table and led to models of chemical bonding; J. J. Thomson discovered the electron using the cathode ray tube in 1897. The size of an atom was only determined after the invention of X-ray crystallography in the 1920s. So, an enormous amount of scientific discovery had to take place before anything like precision could be agreed on. And of course Herman Hollerith, who began building punch card-based data processing machines as early as 1884, and applied it to tabulating the results of the 1890 United States census. Even then, age was only recorded as "Age at nearest birthday". Hope you are well, old colleague. MinorProphet (talk) 20:02, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Precisionism?  Card Zero  (talk) 07:08, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]