That may have been true in the spring and fall, but her hours would not have been adjusted in the winter and summer to account for the later and earlier sunrises. In a poetic sense, the book is saying she arrived to work around sunset and was let off of work as the sun was coming up. Depending on a city's latitude, the difference between when the sun sets in the summer and winter can be as much as four or five hours. Her work hours weren't really tied to the sun's rising and setting. Last, the etymology of a word or phrase can often only be answered on a case-by-case basis, and, many times, it's simply a matter of speculation why things came to be the way they ended up.įirst, the sentence is an idiomatic way to say that she was working a long night shift. (And note that the difference between, for instance, sun down, sun-down, and sundown is just a matter of what dictionary you use and what style you follow.) But, in this case, I was able to address the specific example sentences by referring to a dictionary. This is why there are such things as style guides. When it comes to making things up so as to describe them in ways that haven't been defined yet, it's a matter of personal opinion, based on whatever conventions you follow that would seem to make the most sense to people in general. Although grammar is related to style, it's not the same thing. She took a factory job working from dusk to dawn.Īsking about conventions of punctuation and hyphenation is too broad of a question to answer in this context.Last, you could express the same thing in the most idiomatic way: (This would not be entirely idiomatic, but the syntax and grammar is fine.) She took a factory job working from moonrise to moonset.Merriam-Webster also defines similar words as they relate to the moon.ġ : the rising of the moon above the horizonġ : the descent of the moon below the horizon She took a factory job working from sunset to sunrise.She took a factory job working from sundown to sunup.Meriam-Webster gives actual definitions for both of those words.
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