I thought for sure that someone would have asked and answered this one, but a search turned up zilch. So if I am being repetitive please excuse me, but what exactly do the words of the song title mean?
Thanks
Quasi
The singer wakes up in the morning, troubled by his thoughts, and the clock tells him it is twenty-five or (twenty-)six to four a.m.
I’m pretty sure that Cecil, himself, has addressed this.
IIRC . . . its a time Quasi,
as in :
“What time is it ?”
“Oh 25 or 6 minutes until 4 o’clock.”
I may be remembering this incorrectly, but I think I am right.
damn you tom, got me by 2 minutes !
Nope. Our own St Eutychus handled it:
Actually, Songbird with an assist by Euty.
But when I used the search option on this MB, I put in “25 or 6 to 4 meaning?”, and what came back was a list of today’s threads. Admittedly, I placed the search in GQ only - any date, because it seemed like a GQ topic, and I was very surprised that nothing came back relating to my question. Thanks very much for answering however, and if nothing else maybe I provided a little nostalgia attack for some of you. This will probably go into the IMHO threads, but wouldn’t the character in the song have erred with more time instead of less? As in “26 or 5 to 4?” Then again who am I to argue with poetic license?
Quasi
I know this is irrelevant to the thread, but since I’ve always hated Chicago, I’ll say it: Nobody would ever read an alarm clock as “twenty-five or six to four”. You’d read it as 3:34 or 3:35, or possibly (and this is really stretching it) twenty-six or five to four. Twenty-five or six makes you mentally reverse the direction of the clock.
I think it was just an intriguing sounding concatenation of words that happened to fit a melody they had, so they built a song around it.
I disagree. I can easily imagine someone announcing the time as being “25 or 6 to 4.” It seems to me that I’ve heard disc jockeys announce the time on the radio in exactly that way. They were presumably glancing at a clock on the wall and noting that the minute hand was close to the 35 minute mark, so they would start to say, “It’s 25 to 4,” but then they would notice that the hand hadn’t quite reached it, so they would say instead, “It’s 25 . . . or 6 to 4.” I think that when I first heard the song I immediately knew what that line was saying. There may be a dialectal difference in how people make time statements. I think some people don’t use the expression “X (minutes) to Y”, but some certainly do.
or it may be a generational thing.
I learned to tell time in the late forties. My kids learned to tell time in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s. They were used to looking at digital clocks. I never saw one growing up.
So they always expressed time as 3:35, never as 25-2-4
We now know why the younger generation is messed up.
Digital clocks and watches. An entire level of abstract symbolism has been removed from their lives.
Now if we could just figure out why the older one is…
TV
In my case, that would be beer. And this infernal board. 