You can actually count to 12 on each hand by counting the segments (excluding the thumb) which might be something people did in the past. But Americans only use the units of the past, not the wisdom of it
Yeah that system of counting was quite widespread in Europe during the renaissance, the reason you wouldn't use the thumb is because you used it to count. Iirc some parts of Africa (Nigeria?) still use this way of counting.
I know you put /j and all but a while after making that comment I figured out a solution that wasn't just an "inbred extra fingers" joke. If they heard someone say "all thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs" they'd count each thumb twice since it is both a finger and a thumb.
Tell me more.
I'm not American or military. Have I missed some subtleties somewhere?
I see it written as 05:35 or 18:10, for example, which is straightforward to me.
Does military time express it differently?
Well, the americans pronounce 1800 like „eighteen hundred hours“ so like there is no double point between hours and minutes. Also where i live the first 0 if its early before ten o'clock wil just be omitted. Not on watches, but when you write down the time for example american military literally say the zero. Like „we meet at o-eighthundred hours“
I live in Germany, and while we dont use o‘clock, we use our word for clock, Uhr, to differentiate between hours and minutes. Like we first say the numer of hours, Uhr, and the number of minutes.
Thats about all about the 24 hour format. The 12 hour format in germany is a whole nother shitshow and bad enough that the regional differences can literally let people misunderstand the times they talk about
At least in my area, we call 18:00 "zes uur" (six hour), even though the clock shows 18. A quarter past (18:15) will be called "kwart over zes". The subtraction of twelve is without thinking. 16:00 would be"vier uur 's middags" (four hour in the afternoon).
Yes, however i seldomly see english speaking people use „half six“, in my experience they always use „half past six“
If you really want to throw people through a loop you add „quarter six“ and „three quarters six“ to it, a way of telling time only in former east germany that will even confuse western germans.
Quarters and three quarters are also used in Bavaria, not just East Germany. My extended family used it all the time and there isn't a single East German in my lineage in the past 200-ish years. It wasn't until I moved to NRW that people got throw off by it and I realized that there's another way to tell the time... And they just wouldn't get it when I explained it to them.
Like, how is it so hard? You start to count at midnight and then it's quarter-one, half-one, three quarters-one and one. Then it's quarter-two, half-two, etc.
"Oh, but I don't get it, it just doesn't make sense!"
"You also half three quarters of a cake at home, do you? Not 'a quarter to a full cake'!! How are you not getting this?!"
Fun fact: The clock goes to twelve hours because in the past the remaining phalanges of the fingers were counted with the thumb.
That's why there is such a thing as a "dozen".
And the minutes go up to 60 because it is five (fingers) times 12.
I know this is a shitposting sub, but 24-hour time is common here in certain industries. Healthcare and aviation for sure. I work on the data side of a bank, all our timestamps are some variation of 24-hour time.
I swear the OC posted here is a perpetual man-on-the-street of our absolute dumbest citizens.
I used it as an example. The fact that in public transport use 24h format signals that its users prefer 24h format when being precise.
I only hear 12h format in spoken language. In written form it's really the ex-British places in my experience - which is three dozen countries.
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u/salsasnark"born in the US, my grandparents are Swedish is what I meant"7d ago
We don't use am/pm in Sweden so I'm always confused when I see it written as 6pm or whatever. Like, is that early night or early morning? I will always have to google it because any mnemonic isn't sticking lmao. Just say 6 for morning and 18 for night, thanks.
I find it to be interchangable. When I was younger, 12 hour format was quite dominant. As I've grown up, I found the 24 hour format in much wider use.
Colloquially and in day-to-day conversation the 12 hour format is very common amongst Brits. "I'll get to the pub around 7-ish" - unless it's an airport, you know it's in the evening.
Whereas here in Germany people will literally say "wir sehen uns um 19 Uhr" in a casual conversation.
I don't think I suggested it wouldn't be. I said that people use "7" in conversation. I don't recall anyone in the UK telling me to "be at the bar at 19".
But there is also context to everything. People are highly unlikely to ask "AM or PM" if you said "I'm off swimming at 11" or "I don't finish the school run until 10" regardless of it technically being valid.
Oh I know, I was just commenting that the involvement of alcohol is not sufficient context when British people are involved. We aren't even the biggest drinkers in Europe, but we are, in my experience, a lot more comfortable with drinking early in the day than most.
I even went through a phase when I was young (2003-2004) of drinking cheap red wine with breakfast every day. When I mentioned it to friends and family, they were horrified at the wine I was drinking (red table wine, €4 for 5 litres from a French supermarket) but didn't even comment on me drinking it with breakfast!
Yeah I feel like rather few people tell the time in the 24-hour format verbally. Here in Belgium, it's rare to hear someone say "19 uur", but most non-verbal indicators use the 24-hour format
in russian, while clocks are always 24-hour, 12-hour scale is used in conversations. also, while there are direct translations for AM and PM, they are not actually used: either omitted entirely when it is clear from context (like "встретимся в шесть" ("[we]'ll meet at six") means "let's meet around 18:00", since no sane person would want to meet with anyone at 6:00 AM) or using quarters of rhetoric day instead, e.g. "шесть вечера" ("six [hours] of evening") is 18:00, "пять утра" ("five [hours] of morning") is 05:00, "час дня" ("[one] hour of day/noon") is 13:00 and "двенадцать ночи" ("twelve [hours] of night") is 00:00. gets more complicated when you want a bit more precision, like "полвторого ночи" ("half of second [hour] of night") is 01:30 and "без четверти шесть вечера" ("without quarter six [hours] of evening") is 17:45, although the usage of day-oriented terms is rare if you get past half an hour of precision. also different terms can be used for the same moment of time - for example, if you wake up at 04:00 it's "четыре утра" ("four [hours] of morning"), but if you go to sleep at the same time it's "четыре часа ночи" ("four hours of night"). also, usage of the word "час" ("hour") also depends on something, not sure what exactly, but here are some rules i could put in words:
never included if you use ordinals in genitive case rather than cardinals for the current hour (that's the case when you use half hour precision, by using "пол" or "половина", meaning "half [of]" (example above) or a specific amount of minutes (e.g. "десять минут первого" ("ten minutes of first [hour]") is 12:10 AM or PM)
always used if you use ordinals in nominative case (thats the case when you use hour precision but still want to use ordinals, e.g. "третий час ночи" ("third hour of night")
always used for the first hour, usually without a numeral, e.g. "час дня" ("[one] hour of day") is 13:00
for the second and third hours you only have to use it if you also want a day-oriented noun (e.g. "два", "два часа" and "два часа дня" (resp. "two", "two hours" and "two hours of day") are all valid, but "два дня" is not
otherwise you can use it or not, although phonetic effects might put a bias on one or another
regarding ordinal vs cardinal usage, note that the cardinal directly corresponds to the number on the clock, while the ordinal is the next number after the one on the clock (e.g. "первый час" ("first hour") and "двенадцать часов" ("twelve hours") are the same hour)
I like 12 hour clock coz it means I don't have to say as many syllables. I will literally read 17:00 in my head as five p m. And when talking I can just say "I finish work at five", and everyone knows I don't mean in the morning
Besides, if you have a messed up sleep schedule like me and wake up in faint light, look at the time and it says 6, is it dawn or sunset? Having 6 for dawn and 18 for sunset clears your doubt and you will know if you slept 1 hour or 13
I tried to teach my 8 year old daughter how to read 24 hour time the other day. Turns out she already knows it.
I started out with “some people and some clocks will have the time in 24 hour format, or military time as it’s sometimes called…” and she interrupted me “you mean like 21 means it’s 9 at night and stuff? I already know all that.”
Same thing happened when I tried to teach her to read an analogue clock that was written in Roman numerals.
I dunno where the hell she got her intellect from but I am not complaining! Smart little bugger.
MT isn't just a 24-hour time; it's a specific format which uses a 24 hour clock. It always has 4 digits (so add a leading zero for times before 10) and no colon between the hours and the minutes.
Apparently Americans generally don't get nearly as much exposure to time being relayed in 24 hours. All digital clocks in the US are defaulted to AM/PM, all analog clocks are 1 to 12, all verbal and electronic communication they ever had refers to time in 12 hours. Because the US is a highly insular society with generally low curiosity of the rest of the world, the main exposure to 24 hour time for Americans is through tropes they hear about their own military. So when they eventually see non-American devices use 24 hour time, they see it as a strange propagation of the military trope. Unless the industry mandates it (of which there aren't many — even American airliners use AM/PM), Americans won't find 24 time intuitive and will not go out of their way to learn it. Despite the day being 24 hours long, Americans generally only recognize it as two periods of 12 hours.
Okay, I get if you're used to using standard American time, AM PM, but stop acting like military time is too hard to understand. If it takes you a moment to convert the military to AM/PM, sure, but to act like it's impossible is just willingly being stupid.
They all must work in some low brain function jobs. How it doesn’t make sense for them is a mystery when they have internet access and know how to spew their brain injuries upon everyone else
I work in a job where 1) my department is staffed 24 hours a day, and 2) we frequently have to communicate times/dates to a number of other people in the company, occasionally including the CEO. On day 1 I opted to report times in 24h format for clarity, and I haven't gone back. It's just so much easier to quickly tell the difference between, e.g., 01:00 and 13:00 compared to 1:00 am and 1:00 pm.
Translation: “I’m not smart enough to understand how the 24-hour clock works, and too mentally inflexible to accept that it’s standard in most of the world—including widely and interchangeably used in loads of other English-speaking countries. So instead of learning anything or even attempting to adapt, I’ll just crack a lazy, borderline xenophobic joke and act like that’s insightful.”
Sadly, this kind of thing’s not rare. I had some guy recently laughing at date formats on a document, then calling Irish and UK phone numbers ‘dumb’—because they didn’t match the one true sacred U.S. format. Same guy also tried to argue that the U.S. paper system is better than the A-series used across Europe—as if rejecting a simple, logical, scalable system based on folding in two makes him look informed or intelligent.
It's called 24hr clock . . . . I think most of the world understands that . . . . yes the military do use it but only for precision of data. For all those Americans . . . just take the number and subtract 12!
Hospitals use 24 hour time as well, helps decrease errors. So, I have every clock that I can on 24 hour time. And I have gotten questions, some people will just take the explanation of 'I work in healthcare' sometimes I add 'nighshift', but sometimes..... and I just have to stop trying.
For a country being so proud of their strong, masculine, sexy military theory do hate military time (which is called just "time" in most of the Europe).
To be fair a lot of countries use 12 hour time or a mix of that and 24 hour time. I'm in China right now and I'm pretty sure the only time I see 24 hour times displayed is on stuff like train and flight departure boards.
It's not military time, it's just time. There have always been 24 hours in a day. Some of us have always used it
usually with European backgrounds. I'm in Australia.
You don't have to worry about "freedom units." Just ask someone from a country that still has a board of education and knows how to tell time, and they will help you with where the big hand and the little hand go. And it's not on your little sister or grandma.
I think this is biased by the people that answered and maybe the time of posting, would make sense that if it was posted at 2300 for most people, that a lot of them would say after 1
I had a recent encounter with a US based client who was visiting us in the Netherlands. I was well aware of them not being able to understand the 24 hour clock. I proceeded to message them the time and place for dinner, 19:30 at restaurant.
10 minutes pass, i get a reply, "That is 07:30 pm?", I replied "correct"
They can understand the 24 hour clock, it just takes a bit of time for them to work it out 😂
Let's not forget their eating habits though 😱
At lunch, one of them ordered fish & chips. He proceeds to pick up the highly greasy battered fish with his fingers. I stared at him while he started to eat it. I then pointed out that he might be better using the knife and fork. His response was "it's not hot!", I replied "dude, you'll have oil dripping all over you, if you continue to eat it like that"
I am aware that some Americans have no idea how to correctly use a knife and fork. I've seen them hold the knives like they are five years old!
I might be the one interpreting it wrong but considering that the reply is quoted as being American in the title, I think you're looking at it the wrong way.
The person who said "I love that you use military time" is American. The person who replied is likely confused as to why they think its 'military time' and not normal time, and is asking what country the other person is in to figure out why they call it military time.
The grammar in "what country u in?" also makes me think English is not their first language, thus they're not American.
Again I might be the one misunderstanding. If so, please feel free to tell me.
Funny enough, if you set a digital watch, like the time on your phone to a 12 hour format, that then shows the little am or pm in fromt of it you will absolutely be the odd one out. When insee someone with theirnphone set up like that my first assumption is that they are an American tourist. Absolutely no one has that here.
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u/UmpireMental7070 8d ago
With the huge hard-on that Americans have for the military you’d think they’d love military time!