I use these all the time, my kids say "just tell me what time it is."
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Seriously, though. It takes less brain processing power and just about the same speech-time to just say the dang time.
If your brain works in digital time, this is true.
Us olds have to translate the other direction.
It’s like hearing someone say “why doesn’t everyone just speak English? Why go through the extra effort of speaking Spanish?” because you assume everyone’s internal monologue is in English.
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I think there's bigger problems if you have to process the time. If you've never heard it in your life, maybe you'd stop and think, but it's honestly just something you learn and know, no thinking required.
It's like when people don't know 24 hour time, when it's something you've just grown up with, there's no thinking and then you are confused when you hear people have to think about it or "calculate".
24 hr time should be the global standard too, IMO. Reduce all possibilities of confusion, I say.
To be honest, it's mainly just USA that just use 12-hour (and call 24-hour "military time"?), the large majority of the world use both interchangeably.
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I did the same thing with my parents, mostly because they'd just say "quarter after" but would never say any number. If you made a word cloud of everything I've ever said in my life, "after what" would be gigantic in the center with every other word tiny around the edges.
This just triggered a deep memory from within me. My brother used to say "half past" when I asked him the time, and when I would say "half past what?" the response was always "Half past the monkeys ass, a quarter to his balls"
I still don't know what it means or where it came from, but when I was 8 years old, it was hilarious.
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Old man yelling at clouds checking in. I understand the prevalence of digital, but still can't wrap my head around younger people not understanding how to read an analog clock.
Of course the kids don't know how to read them. Kids rarely encounter analog clocks and when they do, they have several digital clocks within arms length. Most people wouldn't reach for a slide rule when they have a calculator.
And to be fair, analog clocks are objectively worse than digital clocks in every way aside from aesthetics.
I grew up around both, for simply telling time, digital is far better. Analog though to me gives a better sense of the passage of time I guess you could call it? Like, you can see the hour hand has moved a distance after a little while; or if I want to do something for half an hour, I just have to watch for when the minute hand is pointing 180 degrees away from where it was when I started, things like that.
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Come to Germany. We still argue about how to properly say that. In some regions "quarter nine" means 8:15.
Could be worse. Could be Dutch.
What time is it?
Ten over half eight.
........
7:40
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In Spanish its pretty common to express time past 30 as next hour minus time left. So 8:45 can be expressed as 9 minus 15
I feel this is the way that best reflects how you look at an analog clock. First hours then minutes. It'd be interesting to know if the amount of people saying time the analog way depends on the system used.
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KDE for years had a clock option called "fuzzy clock" where you could set the granularity of time, either in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minute resolution. So it would just say "five to six" or whatever in words. It was designed to keep you from clock watching while working. Not sure if it exists anymore :)
It does! I recently switched to Linux, and when messing with some of the options, I found that. It's pretty neat tbh
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I went to public school in the 80s and every classroom had a very large analog clock on the wall. Even back then, it mildly annoyed me when teachers and other adults would say "half past" and so on. It always sounded archaic to my ears, even 40+ years ago.
I also get annoyed when people say "two thousand and twenty-four" for the year. Just say "twenty twenty-four". We didn't say "one thousand nine-hundred and eighty-four" back in the day, we said "nineteen eighty-four".
There was a solid decade where the pattern broke, and so e people didn't get back into it.
Two thousand, two thousand one etc don't really work as "twenty oh-one", etc.
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I was taught in the '80s that you shouldn't use 'and' in a number that isn't followed by a decimal portion (e.g. 23 and 4 hundredths). I've seen various back-and-forth on that topic over the years.
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Why would the use of analog or digital clocks affect that? Quarter is 1/4th of an hour = 15 minutes. I don't see the correlation and I can't confirm it from personal experience either.
The way information is presented impacts how it is stored. If you look at a clock face and want to know what time it is it's very easy to visualize the passage of time as fractional because the time is presented to you without numbers being the primary focus and instead divisions. Mentally it is easier for you then to grapple with time as a fractional division. However, if instead of presenting the day as being divides into 2 portions of 12 hours, themselves divided into 12 subdivisions, those then further divided into 12 subdivisions of the 5tha of those divisions, you presented it as a simple read out the passage of time feels more like a linear stream mostly indistinguishable.
How we present time changes how we think about time, which then changes how we describe time.
Man language is cool...
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I think it's because, visually, 3:15 puts the minute hand a quarter of the way around the clock face. Digital clocks don't have a corresponding visual.
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I was thinking the other day that I never hear the phrase "bottom of the hour" (meaning __:30) anymore.
Strange, nothing has changed in my experience. It's a general way to tell the time, not exclusive to analog clocks.
Laughs in Austrian.
The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.
eg:
3:15 -> "viertel vier" = "quarter four"
3:30 -> "halb vier" ("hoiba viere" in dialekt) = "half four"
3:45 -> "dreiviertel vier" = "three quarters four"
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Not in Norway lol. If you want to meet up at 11:20 you say "ti på halv tolv" meaning "ten minutes before half hour before twelve.
Yeah, it took me a while to wrap my head around it too.
I generally avoided use of the quarter/half shorthand because people often say it with no context.
“What time is it?”
“Half past.”
Half past what? Sort of an assumption that the asker has a clue what hour it is, but if they knew, why would they ask the time?
I’m not sad to see the phrases go.
Never actually heard anyone exclude the hour, it's always "half past 3", "quarter to 8", "5 till 6", etc
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It does not make sense to convert digits to figure of speech, just for the fuck of it.
The practice still has one very important application:
"What time is it?"
"Half past a monkey's ass, quarter to his balls"
Our family's was "freckle past a hair and time to get a watch"
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In Lesotho (and I assume other developing countries that teach the English standard) they use those phrases because the 24-hour day and 60-minute hours are a foreign concept to many kids and their families.
I rarely even bother using 12 hour time any more.
I hear these phrases(the romanian version) much more often than an exact time
This is also how i was taught time in english
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