The minute before noon is 11:59 AM. It makes damn little sense for the “M” to change between 11:59 and 12:00 when you think about it. Would make far more sense to have it change between 12:59 and 1:00, wouldn’t it?
Then again, we’re working with a system of two periods of 12 hours each, each divided into 60 and those subdivided into 60 again. [Holy drams and furlongs, Batman!] A situation with historical explanations, I’ll grant, but it still makes no sense, so appeal to the sensible isn’t going to fly here.
The minute before noon is 11:59 AM. It makes damn little sense for the “M” to change between 11:59 and 12:00 when you think about it. Would make far more sense to have it change between 12:59 and 1:00, wouldn’t it?
Then again, we’re working with a system of two periods of 12 hours each, each divided into 60 and those subdivided into 60 again. [Holy drams and furlongs, Batman!] A situation with historical explanations, I’ll grant, but it still makes no sense, so appeal to the sensible isn’t going to fly here.
Was the caller from Indiana? Indiana has parts on Central time, and parts on Eastern time. Some of the parts on Eastern time use daylight savings, and some don’t. The same for the parts on Central time. You need an atomic clock, a GPS locator, and a sextant to figure out what the hell time it is in Indiana.
The natives call it fast time or slow time, so an 11:00 am appointment is usually followed by the question “Is that fast time or slow time?”. Maybe high noon and low noon are local variants.
Long ago, there was a movie parody in Mad magazine titled “Hah! Noon”. (Imagine Hah! uttered with a Yiddish inflection to get the humor of it. The editors of Mad seemed to assume that all their readers were conversant in Yiddish.)
It showed their parody of Gary Cooper ready to shoot Killer Diller Miller when he arrived on the high noon train. The clock portentously goes “Bong 12 times.” But no Miller. Gary Cooper is puzzled. Then someone shouts, “Killer Diller Miller missed the high noon train! He’s a-comin’ on the low noon train!” That turned out to be a single “bong” from the clock at 12:05.
One note here. Technically, “high noon” is when the sun locally is at its zenith. Because of standardized time zones, made even more complicated by Daylight Saving Time in some places, civil noon likely is different from high noon. And in the cases of DST being involved, often by more than an hour.
/highjack#1]
Fershlugginer! Yay! Potzrebi (I bet I misspelled it again)
/highjack#2]
Did anyone else ever really want to edit a certain song that starts out, “I hate to see, the evening sun go down…” But I would hate even worse to see the morning sun go down.
PS I think low noon happens around the end of December.
Those who insist that noon is neither AM or PM are most likely the same ones that waited for 2001 to celebrate the new milenium.
Technicalities aside, by convention, noon is 12:00 PM. If you don’t believe me check out any digital clock. 12:00 PM is noon, 12:00 AM is midnight.
Those who insist otherwise deserve to find themselves sitting all alone at midnight in a closed restaurant wondering where everybody else is for the 12:00 PM get together.
Ah, the triumph of precision over accuracy, and literal-mindedness over communication.
When dealing with any language, the only equation one must ever have in mind is that language/=math. Just as “I ain’t got nobody” emphatically does not mean that in fact, the poor soul actually has someone, “12 p.m.” means noon, and 12 a.m. means midnight, regardless of any astronomical realities. And the millenium started on January 1, 2000, because only pedants care that there was no Year 0. Languages are democracies in which the majority interpretation wins, regardless (or even irregardless) of the precious concerns of pointy-headed minorities.
My Dad says the New York Times once used to state “12m” as 12 meridian since 12:00:00 is neither ante nor post meridian. However, this caused even more confusion. Hence, we say 12am or 12pm, and we understand which half of the 24 hour day we mean, thank goodness. I say, we should go to military time, but then I hear the Army reads a clock (verbally) as “something hundred hours” vs. the Navy which simply says “something hundred”! Sheesh!
Just wait until the new Daylight Savings law kicks in…oh, what a jolly mess we’ll have then!
Soes anyone really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
If you’re meeting me, you’ll get no confirmation, and you’ll be expected to figure it out.
Since 1 minute past noon is 12:01PM, I take it you have enough sense to figure out what I meant. If you can’t, then I likely didn’t care to meet with you anyway!
The military uses standard time notation. Properly midnight is 0000 hours. 2400 hours is slightly irregular. It is only used to indicate “the end of the day”. Thus an order “do this between 1800 and 2400 hours on Tuesday” means “get it done between 1800 hours and the end of the day Tuesday.” This is more concise than the order “do this between 1800 hours Tuesday and 0000 hours Wednesday”. Same idea in less words. Do you run Windows? On my box, 2359 is immediately followed (correctly) by 0000 hours.
