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.
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”.
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.
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
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.
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… 😎
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.
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”
I feel this comment betrays a misunderstanding of what language even is. Saying it like “two forty-five” or whatever is a figure of speech as much as “quarter to three” is.
No, I meant it. “Two forty-five” is a figure of speech. If you were giving the time in exact terms you’d say something like “it’s been two hours and forty-five minutes since midday/midnight”. You’re just stuck in this idea that your way of expressing it is the right one.
Strange, nothing has changed in my experience. It’s a general way to tell the time, not exclusive to analog clocks.
