Well, you could make like power traders/schedulers and refer to times as hour ending 1, hour ending 2, etc.
It’s not complicated, but it’s a little confusing at first.
Hour ending 1 refers to the first hour of the day, i.e. midnight thru 1 am. So, hour ending ending 14 starts at 1 pm.
Using the 24 hour clock fixes this neatly.
Really? “Half past” is very common here (Chicago), and I use it myself interchangebly with the regular “-thirty” construction. It’s also memorialized in the classic (at least when I was growing up–I’m 35) schoolboy reply to “what time is it?” : “Half past monkey’s ass, quarter to his balls.”
These things are both regional and changeable. A usage that, though not new, seems to have become more acceptable in Britain recently is saying, e.g., “half nine” instead of “half past nine.” These days I hear it quite a lot when I listen to BBC radio over the internet. When I lived in Britain, 20 years ago, people might sometimes have said this in informal speech, but I pretty sure any BBC announcer who said it would have been in big trouble.
That was all familiar to me in West Texas, too.
I was taught in second or third grade (mid-80s, living in MA) to label time as hour -> quarter past-> half past -> quarter of. We did worksheets on the concepts and everything. It’s so ingrained that I’m baffled that anyone might assume that quarter of might mean 15 minutes after the hour rather than before.
Well the problem is that as a sentence it makes no sense. Unless you are specifically familiar with the phrase then there is nothing about “quarter of” that gives a clue to what it means.
It the south (at least Arkansas) when I was growing up in the 70’s is was common to hear and say “half past seven”. The one that threw me was the people who would say “half seven” to mean 7:30. I have since heard this much more from Irish and Brits.
I grew up in Baltimore, and I’ve been saying “quarter of,” “twenty of,” “ten of,” and so on all my life. Around where I grew up, I don’t remember anyone saying “to” instead of “of.”
Back home in Texas, before dirt was invented, I remember hearing ‘quarter of five’ expressed as ‘quarter till five.’ I also remember ‘quarter after five,’ ‘half past five,’ etc., etc. Of course, we didn’t have digital clocks to complicate things; we had to remember the big hand, little hand thing. Digital is better.
First song that popped into my mind…
Interestingly around here, the actual hour is sometimes dropped when the discussion is about some immediate timeframe that everyone knows. For example, when waiting for a scheduled event, like a bus arriving or the end/start of a game or practice.
“What time is it?”
“Quarter of.”
Kind of funny, but I hear it all the time.
I grew up in Tennessee and I recall hearing quarter of and half all my life.
I have a friend, who has a clock that tolls the quarter hours. I think that terminology would be handy if you had a clock like that.
I may be imagining things, but I seem to recall hearing an announcer on NPR using that terminology or at least saying that it was half past the hour. I also recall hearing “at the top of the hour”, which doesn’t make much sense, except on an analog clock.
For that matter, I wonder if kids get confused if they are told to turn clockwise?
And this always confuses me, because I can’t remember whether half seven is 7:30 or 6:30. To explain: in other languages I know smatterings of, like German and Hungarian, the expression halb sieben or fêl hét (literally, “half seven”) would mean 6:30. I forget what it’s like in German, but in Hungarian negyed hét (“one fourth seven”) means 6:15 and, similarly háromnegyed hét (“three-quarters seven”) means 6:45. Think of it as a quarter of the way to seven, half-way to seven, and three-quarters of the way to seven.
I am still not getting how this could’ve possibly originated.
“Till”, “to”, “past”, “before”, “after” all make sense in the context of the direction the time goes. These words are all used in very similar contexts elsewhere and mean the same thing. “of” does not (as far as I know)
Top and bottom of the hour are a convention for labeling two existing sides of a scale.
“of” is completely ambiguous. When you say “quarter of 7”, you mean there’s 7 o’clock, and then there’s… a quarter of it… which literally means 1:45, but that makes no sense.
So assume you mean a quarter of an hour, but then I would infer you meant 6:15 (half of 7 being 6:30, and three quarters of 7 being 6:45).
However, perhaps you meant a quarter of an hour that is typically called “7”, which would mean you meant 7:15.
I just can’t think of any other context where the preposition “of” is used to mean anything like “preceding” or “before”. I am just not following how this could’ve occurred as a regionalism. Some family somewhere must have first started doing it first, but since it would not have been clear from context what they meant how could it have spread?
It’s in all the Agatha Christie books.
It’s a shortened version of the same thing. Just missing a word. That’s exactly how most people I know speak.
Half past seven… half seven. A simple abbreviation.
The definition of of from Merriam-Webster online:
Baffles me, too.
The first time I heard “Quarter of” I didn’t want to look stupid so I sat there trying to figure out what the hell it could mean. Logically, it seemed to me, “Quarter of eight” should be 7:15… that’s a quarter of the way into the eighth hour. But that seemed unlikely; 7:45 or 8:15 seemed likelier. There was no logical way to tell which it was, though.
Southern Ontario here, by the way.
Yup. Despite being 29, I was also brought up with both analogue and digital clocks, and among people who routinely spoke of “five to nine” or “quarter past eight,” as I do myself. But I never encountered the expression “quarter of nine” or “five of nine” before adulthood.
Really, is there anyone who hasn’t seen a standard clock, anyway?
I can understand kids who’ve never seen a rotary phone or a TV that works with rabbit ears, but standard clocks are *all over the place. * They’re still pretty commonly used. The stores are full of them.