See poster below:
The venue is the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, Sweden. The date and time would be expressed in North America as Saturday, November 3rd, 7:30 p.m.
What does the “KL” after “NOV” designate?
Thanks! I had thought that “KL” went with “NOV” because of the spacing.
Is 7:30 o’clock a normal way of saying the time there?
I can imagine cases where a time expressed only by number might be ambiguous, even time in 24-hour format. We in the US tend to use the colon to show hours and minutes of the time (e.g. 7:00); in gnoitall’s example they didn’t even say 1900, just 19, for 7 pm.
Sweden reporting.
The poster says 19.30 (7:30 pm). No one would actually say nineteen - thirty though, everyone would say half past seven, or half eight. In context of the poster kl would be redundant. I just checked Ticketmaster’s Swedish site and nowhere do they use kl. However they follow the convention of using colon, so concert times are given as 19:30 and I think that Swedish is shifting that way too.
But that poster is from the World Slavery tour of 1984, so perhaps that usage was less unusual nearly 40 years ago.
If it’s relevant: The poster in the OP is from 1984.
EDIT: Like gnoitall said
It also occurs to me that the typesetter or whoever may not have been a native Swedish speaker.
It strikes me as completely redundant - what other information besides the time could the “19.30” bit in the OP’s example possibly encode? Even “7.30” would be unambiguous, since it’s unlikely that a heavy metal concert would take place at half past seven in the morning. The only slight ambiguity I see here is the usage of a point instead of a colon to separate hours from minutes, but I suppose it’s very unlikely that the point is meant to indicate a decimalised expression of time in the manner of Swatch’s “beats”, i.e., seven o’clock and 30/100 of an hour (which would be 7:18).
Language is not code. We routinely use language that would technically be redundant if each element had to correspond to unique information. However, that doesn’t define normal, correct usage.
I didn’t check the year, but from context I knew it was old.
Right. The normal everyday spoken usage of 24hr time is when there is a risk of ambiguity. Timetables ASF. However for events there’s the exception. Concerts, movies, sports all get the 24hr style. Mostly due to convention and inertia.
Especially as we use the comma for that.
Apparently, customary printed time in Sweden is expressed as a 24-hour clock with a full stop (period) between hours and minutes, as shown in that poster.
At least, if Wikipedia can be believed.