Ok, we all know that AM is ante meridian and PM is post meridian. People always seem confused when they have to refer to noon or midnight. I remember from Junior High journalism class that noon was simply M, for “meridian”, and midnight was “MM”, for something I can’t remember right now. Does anyone else remember this?
(BTW - people who say “Noon is 12 PM since one minute after noon is 12:01 PM” will be eviscerated)
They say I got the power, because I got the monkeys.
They are WRONG! I got the power because I am not afraid to let the monkeys loose.
MODERATOR COMMENT: Please be aware that this thread is from July 1999, until being revived in June 2014 in Post #15. That’s OK, except I want to warn you in advance so you don’t waste time composing a response to a post that’s 15 years old. Also, since Cecil has a column about this, I’m moving it to “Comments” forum. – Dex
The 24-hour clock (some know it as “military time”) solves all these am/pm problems but I
figured out why it is not popularly adopted when a co-worker recently admitted to me he could not tell what time it was by our company computer network time displays after noon. No kidding.
For Cecil’s take (the definitive one, imho) on Midnight, noon, AM and PM:
[\quote]
Really, he just avoids the question of what Noon and Midnight are - he just says they’re not AM or PM. But what are they? I burn with conviction that they are M and MM, but I’m not sure why…
Darkfox,
They are exactly what they are, that is, noon and midnight. There is no need to give thema special designation as there is only one noon and one midnight. The reason there is an AM and PM is that there are two of time during the day (i.e. 12:01AM and 12:01PM and 6:53AM and 6:53PM). But by designating noon vs. midnight, we remove that redundancy and a special letter is no longer necessary.
I agree with Cecil. (There’s a controversial position.) 12:00 noon and midnight are neither AM or PM. However, if someone has written 12:00 PM and I’m forced to interpret it, I would say it means noon.
M and MM look vaguely familiar. I hope somebody can explain them.
All the electronic clocks I’ve ever seen denote noon as 12 PM and midnight as 12 AM. If you want to get really technical about it, “noon” is almost a non-entity since it’s really just only a second, if that - then you get 12:00:01, which is obviously post meridiem. (Same for midnight.)
I guess the argument could go that since 59 of the 60 seconds comprising the minute of 12:00 noon are PM, then the one second in question (12:00:00) can probably be considered PM as well, simply by force of majority.
Um, military time runs from 0001 hours to 2400 hours. UTC however runs from 0000 to 2359. Be careful which you call which as you might end up having some units arrive a day late or a day earlier, approximatley, for an event.
First, you have to understand what the meridian is (yes it is meridian).
The meridian in question is an imaginary circle that runs through the north and south poles and intersects the zenith point (where the zenith is, by definition, directly above your head). Note that the location of the meridian varies with longitude but not with latitude.
As the Earth rotates, the sun appears in the morning in the East. It continues to rise until it crosses the meridian, thus the terms ante (before) meridian and post (after) meridian. Noon and midnight can be neither AM or PM, since they are, by definition, the points when the sun lies on the meridian.
Now it’s really more complex than this, since we’ve arbitarily divided the Earth into a couple dozen time zones (consult your atlas). So the only places where local noon actually occurs when the sun is on the local meridian are the geographic zone centers (more or less, since the zone lines don’t exactly run north-south). Because of the slop in the lines this is not exactly true, but in general: If you live in the eastern half of your time zone, local noon occurs after the sun crosses the meridian so noon is PM. If you live in the western half of your zone, noon falls in the AM.
Jrepka, while your statements regarding meridians of longitude is basically true (ignoring daylight savings and local perturbations), the m in a.m. and p.m. actually stands for meridiem–the middle of the day.
Meridian was, indeed, an English word for noon, but it was a corruption of the Latin meridies/meridiem and the a.m./p.m. abbreviations are Latin, not English.
I remember working for the PBS Tv station and having three different style clocks we had to use. The garden variety AM/PM model, a 24-hour military time model, and some God awful 26 hour clock that was supposed to help us co-ordinate satillite hook-ups or some such time against different time zones. Don’t even ask me how that thing was supposed to work or be read because I had no idea (then again, only the engineers really had to worry about it and I was just a Master Control Operator).
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
You are all wrong! The correct answer is: Midnight is 12PM (followed by 12:01PM,12:02PM …), and Noon is 12AM (followed by 12:01AM, 12:02AM …). For the correct explanations, read this: www.simplecodeworks.com/IQ/midnight.html
A long time ago, I saw a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (as I said, it was a long time ago) who received a parking ticket because he was parked past noon. The sign said something like no parking 12pm to 5am, and he thought the sign meant no parking from midnight until 5am but it mean no parking after noon. He argued the point with the judge and, as I remember the episode, Johnny called someone at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, who agreed that there is no agreement as to what 12pm and 12am mean and therefore they are best avoided.
Think about that for a second. The time after 12 noon is 12:01 a.m.? The “afternoon” is “a.m.”? I think not. That link makes an argument, but it is not the one that is used by any human being I know. Nobody calls 12:30 after noon “12:30 a.m.” Nobody. I see how you can make an argument for it, but it’s all moot, as that’s not how it is actually used in real life, which is all that matters.
Anyhow, I avoid the ambiguity by writing 12 noon and 12 midnight but, conventionally, it’s always been 12 a.m. = midnight, 12 p.m. = noon.