When I was young I was like everyone else taught the difference between standard time and daylight savings time. Clocks were set ahead an hour to initiate daylight savings time, and set back an hour when standard time resumed (as captured in the saying, "spring forward, fall back").
Recently I saw a reference to some program happening in the summer that started at 10am Eastern Standard Time. At first I thought they were mistaken and meant to say Eastern Daylight Time, but then I realized that they were instead adopting a new meaning for the word "standard". It simply meant "what everyone in the Eastern time zone means by 10am." They could have solved their problem by saying the event started at 10am Eastern Daylight Time. But this solution is not available when you have an event which starts at the same time year-round. It sounds silly to say, "10am Eastern Daylight Time when we are on Daylight Time, and 10am Eastern Standard Time when we are on Standard Time".
When time zone does not need to be specified, the natural and obvious solution is to simply omit "Standard" and "Daylight" entirely. We can just say "10am" and there is no confusion.
But if you also need to specify the time zone, it is much less common to say "Eastern Time". We have an itch to fill that in as "Eastern Standard Time" or "Eastern Daylight Time". Most web sites (<one example>) have no generic word. The brief definition <here> is "The standard time in a zone including the eastern states of the US and parts of Canada" where the word "standard" is overloaded to mean "typical". <Wikipedia doesn't have a solution for this problem> either.
"Standard time" came from the 19th century idea of dividing the world up from East to West in vertical stripes so that in Georgia it's 8am, but just over the line in Alabama it's 7am. It arose from the needs of railroads, the first time that people were moving long distances rapidly and cared about exactly when they arrived and left. Before standard time every place was on its own solar time, where noon is when the sun is highest. So in the course of a day "noon" would ripple across the countryside one town at a time. But that was very confusing for people using railroads running east and west. With standard time, noon comes at one instant to the entire Eastern time zone, and then in another instant it comes to the entire Central time zone.
"Daylight time" was motivated in part by economic benefits (real or imagined). But the basic insight is that people like daylight, and in the summer some of it is happening between 5am and 6am when everyone is asleep. With daylight savings time, that extra hour of daylight is shifted to the evening when people are awake.
So we have one word "standard" capturing the idea of time zones, and now the need arises for another one capturing the idea of "whichever of daylight versus standard time is currently in effect". "Usual", "Customary", and "Common" would be possibilities, but none feels right. The minimalist idea is to just get used to talking about Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. But these are uncomfortably short and lack a certain official ring to them. As best I can tell, this is a problem without a single emerging solution.
I sometimes solve the problem by saying I'm on New York time. Everyone in the world knows what that means approximately and can easily look up what it means precisely. I suppose other equivalents would be Chicago time, Denver time, and Los Angeles time. It's true that people in Europe may not know what time zone Denver is in -- but they can easily look it up on the web.
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