When I was a kid – eons before the debut of digital watches and clocks in case you’re wondering – I found analogue-clock nomenclature confusing as hell.
“Quarter past” / “Quarter till” – ?? a quarter is 25¢, so you’re using a cute way to say 25 past ??
“Five of twelve” – ?? – does this silly grownup mean 5:12, 4:55, 12:05, 11:55??
And since, when you’re reading a clock yourself, the first thing you figure out is the hour, it’s really confusing when you’re a kid and people speak time starting with the minutes instead – “ten 'til three”, “twenty past five” – ??
Even reading analogue clock faces is initially a messy business. First you look where the little hand is pointing and that’s the hour, right? But most of the time the little hand is pointed to somewhere in the limbo area between numbers, and when you’re first learning the area clockwise from one number to the next doesn’t intrinsically intuitively “belong” to the preceding number. And where is the little hand pointing? It’s pointing at one of the little lines between numbers. You know, the little lines that they said mean “one minute each”. Which mean nothing of the sort when the hour hand is pointing at them (actually they are 12-minute lines as far as the hour hand is concerned, but no one teaches you that, do they?). So as a literal-minded child, you go “OK, so the little hand is two and a half marks past three, that is three o’clock and two and a half more, and the big hand is one mark past the six, that’s five ten fifteen twenty twenty five, twenty six, and so it’s three and two and a half o’clock twenty six???”
Then you go home and the alarm clock next to your bed has four marks between each hour instead of five. Not to mention the clock in the living room that only has a 12 and a 6 and a bunch of lines on it. LInes that are hours and not minutes. In fact, quite frankly it’s confusing to have lines and numbers where you’re kind of supposed to ignore the numbers if the minute hand is pointing to them (the “2” doesn’t mean anything, it’s really “10”) and you’re kind of supposed to ignore the lines if the hour hand is pointing to them (12-minute marks, as I said, but as I said no one talks about that).
Uh uh. I was insisting on digital time long before I ever saw a digital clock (serious little kid referring to the time as “four thirteen” or “five fifty” and demanding confirmation from others of their meaning when they say “quarter past eight” etc). Digital is easier. Digital makes sense.
(Not quite as much sense as it would make if we ditched base 60 and AM/PM and went with a 1000-milliday day clock, but better than analogue by far)