I use these all the time, my kids say “just tell me what time it is.”
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.
What do you mean if your brain works in digital time. This doesn’t translate for me and I grew up with regular clocks and wrist watches. All time is the same. A clock with both hands facing 12 is and always has been twelve o’clock. Clock face or digital clock. They give the same time. Comparing two devices that give the same information in different ways to language is absurd.
Your comparison could work if the subject being discussed was 12 vs 24 hour time keeping. Then there is a translation between the two.
When people report the time they aren’t reporting their internal dialogue they’re reading what it says on the display. What it says on the display is “four twenty three” not “halfway between quarter and half past four”.
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.
I’ve been using 24 hour time for the past few years and I still have trouble with it from time to time and have to calculate it in my head.
Also, a different example of something similar is how old I am. Despite knowing my birth year, I still struggle recalling how old I am I still have to take a moment to calculate it.
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.
Even worse than that imo is ‘quarter of’. I swear to god it’s been used to mean both before or after whatever hour they’re talking about
Anyone using “quarter of” to mean X:15 is just incorrect. That’s “quarter after”.
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.
When I was in elementary school, my teacher asked us which kind of clock is easier to read. I said “digital, because it shows the numbers”. She told me “no, analog is easier to read, because you just look at it and know the time without reading the numbers”.
I thought that was stupid back then, and it’s still stupid now, because I have to calculate the time whenever I need to read an analog clock. Still can’t read them quickly.
As someone who now prefers digital, but grew up with mostly analog, I think I can understand what your teacher was trying to say, and it’s really a difference in how the brain is interpreting time itself.
When your internal mental state of time is represented in numbers, then analog clocks feel awkward and clunky, because to use them you have to look at the clock, think “okay the big hand is here, the little hand is there, so that’s 7:45. School starts at 8, so 15 mins to school”. It’s like having to translate through a foreign language and then back to your own.
For people who use analog clocks almost exclusively, as I did in childhood, then your concept of time actually begins to become directly correlated to the position of the hands themselves. Not the numbers the hands are pointing at, but the shape the hands make on the clock face. I think what your elementary teacher was trying to say is that the clock itself becomes a direct physical representation of the ‘size’ of time.
Someone whose brain is working like that looks at an analog clock and immediately thinks “It’s quarter to school” - without any numbers being involved at all. In fact you could completely remove all numbers and markings from the clock face, and the physical comprehension of time would still function equally as well for that person.
So yeah, I understand why analog is bad for people who don’t like it, but I think I see the appeal for people who do.
If your mental model of time is based on analog clocks, then when looking at a digital clock you have to translate it back to clock hands to know what it means, and that’s slower than immediately seeing the analog clock face.
as someone with adhd I much prefer analogue clocks, they allow me to see time through physical distance of the clock hands which helps with perceiving it, numbers don’t do that for me
Younger people dont know how to read analog clocks?
Im young and neither i nor anyone i know doesnt know how to read an analog clock
They stopped teaching it in schools around TX a long time ago. High Schoolers nowadays were shocked when I said that reading clocks was a 1st grade skill because they weren’t taught to tell time.
Schools I’ve worked at have all had analog clocks for all their time pieces, unless a particular teacher brought their own. Or the clocks on computers, but those weren’t always consistently reliable.
I tried to raise my kids with analog clocks, specifically because they’d see digital everywhere else. It didn’t work. They know how to use an analog clock but find it more natural to pull out their phone
Actually, the barbarians won. I’ve mostly given up on analog because they’re wrong too often. My digital clocks rely on power and are synched, so they’re either correct or off. My analog clocks are battery and don’t synch with anything so it might be wrong and it might not be obvious. (While I’ve looked into analog clocks that synch with something, they generally fail the “looks nice” part)
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
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
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 :)
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.
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.
This is literally the first time I’ve ever heard the term “analog clock”.
Also, the title of the book (and film) is not 1984. It’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But I’m not a boomer, I’m genx, so whatever. I’m outta heeeere… 😎
