I have a collection of business cards in my wallet.
What are we going to substitute for ‘clockwise’ and ‘counterclockwise’? Righty and lefty?
Isn’t it obvious? Deasil and Widdershins of course.
I’m a Gen-Xer who grew up with plenty of analog clocks, and I would say that it doesn’t take me longer to know the time from an analog clock, but it does take me longer to tell the time, in the sense of being able to tell someone else. Like, if I’m looking at a digital clock that says 6:49, I hear the words “six-forty-nine” in my head and can say them immediately, but if I’m looking at an analog clock, I know what time it is, but I can’t hear any words in my head and I have to take a second to translate the visual representation into language.
Young people are ignorant and increasingly so. What else is new? I have the misfortune of knowing people born after 2000 who don’t know what a quarter pound is or what .75 means. I also know people born in the 1990s that don’t know what the word “hypothetical” means.
But can they spell?
Yeah, I grew up with analog clocks, and i can read off the time faster with a digital clock, too. But for me, it takes me longer to know what that means if I start with a digital clock. I almost always do better with pictures than with words, though.
It’s spelled correctly on my end.
With the long edit windows on Discourse, there’s lots of ways for the Quickdraw McPedants to jump on a typo in a v1.0 post and by the time they’ve typed up their complaint and submitted it, the post has been edited to hide the goof.
As a frequent Qd McP myself, I’ve had to “nevermind” a bunch of posts over that.
These things?
Pedants, Emily. Pedants. Not Pendants.
Oooooohhhhh, Neeeeevvvvveeeeerrrrrr MMMMMiiiinnnnnnddddd! 
But yeah, good one. Although I find the idea of McDonald’s themed jewelry, even cheap stuff, to be a little unnerving.
I learned a dial clock when I was a kid. When I was a radio host, I had to really learn how to read a dial clock. That was all we had in the studio.
“Well it’s 5:44 here, that’s 16 minutes to the top of the hour when …”
“It’s 2:03 in the morning, and our lines are open. Call [number redacted] for a request, or just to chat.”
“Seven minutes until we’re done here, so that means I can still squeeze in …”
I guess that skill is outmoded now, but I still use a dial wristwatch, which is demarcated in minutes. When my friends ask me for the time, they’re no longer stymied by, “Six minutes until the top of the hour.”
Grimace needs his bling.
But yeah, whenever I read pedantic I always ‘hear’ pendantic and have to correct myself. This led me to wondering about McDonald’s themed jewelry…
Not addressing you specifically, but a number of other posters have also said they never use the word “dialing”, so I pose the question: what does your cell phone display when you tap a contact to place a call? Mine says “Dialing …” . I think it’s perfectly reasonable to refer to the act of initiating a phone call as “dialing” even if there’s no dial. That’s just how language works. It’s like we refer to cell phones as “phones” when they’re really multi-function communication devices and pocket computers, and there are probably young’uns around who have never actually spoken on their “phone”.
I’m like @LSLGuy , and I’m near-sighted without my glasses, which I never wear when doing anything with a phone, tablet, or real computer. I find it very onerous to peck away on a virtual keyboard on my tablet which is much bigger than a typical phone. How people regularly post here from their phones is baffling to me. I do note however that “phone posters” tend to make a disproportionate number of typos!
I don’t think I ever consciously associated “dialing” with rotary phones, though that makes sense. Instead it reminds me of the atdt command for old modems that makes them play the phone dialtones before all the beep beep dee de dum brrrzwaaaaah sounds.
But if dial = spinning the rotary dial, that makes sense…
95% of all my posting here is on my phone. Even when i have my laptop open for other stuff, i often post here on my phone. Yes, i make a lot of swypos, but swyping is really fast and easy.
Fwiw, i found the keyboard of my iPad nearly unusable. It was too small to touch type, and too large to use a single finger quickly. It’s why i basically never used the iPad.
In the 90s, a suicide prevention hotline in my area ran ads with an image of an index finger hovering over a telephone keypad and the slogan “Feeling pressed by life? Press LifeNet.” The use of “press” always struck me as weirdly strained.
Side question: Do you also get that weird issue where the title “Miscellaneous Personal Stuff I Must Share” below some related threads is too long and causes the phone to have horizontal scrolling when it normally doesn’t? (If you use the phone in portrait orientation)
I wasn’t sure - so I just made a call and mine says “Calling”. There’s nothing wrong with using “dialing” to mean making a call - it’s just that I don’t and my kids don’t and I wouldn’t really know whether anyone else I know uses “dialing” ( except my 85 year old mother, who absolutely does)