A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
I think everybody puts too much emphasis on it being a strict generational thing while imo it's mostly a force of habit.
I'm on my early 20s, and used to take around 10 seconds to read an analog clock. Fully digital mind. Bought an analog wrist watch this summer and merely 1-2 months into wearing it I started understanding it instantaneously and all of "half past" type phrases click immediately now.
I'm 38 and still take 10s to read an analog clock.
I do still say half past etc though. I don't really associate them with digital vs analog
It's becausee with digital clocks it's easier to just read the exact time which used to be less convenient. So. Reading digital clocks easy: Juat read what you see. Reading traditionap clocks easy: quarters and halves are a great way to simplify and fasten the time that it takes to tell what time it exactly is.
Not in Norway lol. If you want to meet up at 11:20 you say "ti på halv tolv" meaning "ten minutes before half hour before twelve.
Yeah, it took me a while to wrap my head around it too.
I still hear people talk about the top and bottom of the hour all the time.
Do you prefer the top or the bottom?
I've never heard those phrases in person, only when spoken on TV or radio. Whereabouts you from?
My or is based out of Midwest US, but my we have people scattered across the US.
Since using AM and PM are essentially analogue standards, will people eventually stop saying "it's two o'clock" when they mean "the time is fourteen hundred"?
Talking about hundreds is American military slang/jargon isn't it? I've never heard it elsewhere and it doesn't even make sense. It's fourteen hours, not hundreds. If we're going that way, I think it'll be "twenty past fourteen" and such.
Well, you could say "fourteen twenty" too.
But if "fourteen twenty" was a year we would think its "1420".
Likewise, 1400 is "fourteen hundred" and not "14:00"
Some military standards make a lot of sense, there's no problem adopting it if it's clear.
But 14:00 is what the time is and what the clock shows, not 1400. So I would say 14 o'clock if not 2 o'clock. Would you say "it's nine hundred in the morning" too? Again, it's hours not hundreds. I'm sorry but I don't understand why you're talking about years.
For context my country uses 24h time and I grew up with it.
It is objectively wrong to say 14 o'clock, because "o'clock" refers to the orientation of an analogue clock.
Saying "it's nine in the morning" is redundant in a 24 hour system, because nine would never be anything other than that.
To say 'it's nine hundred" reduces the ambiguity slightly (because you can't really say o'clock).
If you simply say "it's nine" then other people might ask "what's nine?"
Is it "nine past nine"? Or are you telling me "no" in German?
Nine hundred is pretty clear, but not to our primitive ears
i dont know if you are joking or not, but i have all my clocks unironically on 24 hour time.
In real life though, when the clock reads 15:00, how do you vocally express that?
"Its fiften-hundred"
Interesting.
I know people who prefer 24 hour clocks but use am/pm when expressing vocally.
I mean, if someone is asking me the time, I'll tell them 3 o'clock.
but you asked how i vocally express 15:00. Not how I would tell it to an average person :p
I'm not so up my ass that I think everyone uses 24 hour clocks, afterall lol
So does a lot of the world.
I have almost never heard people use quarter or half to tell time.
Why would the use of analog or digital clocks affect that? Quarter is 1/4th of an hour = 15 minutes. I don't see the correlation and I can't confirm it from personal experience either.
I think it's a rounding thing. Looking at an analog clock, you'll see at a glance that the hand is about halfway around the circle but it takes an additional processing step to determine whether it's 6:31 or 6:29. Looking at a digital clock, you'll see that it's 6:29 first and then it takes another step of processing to determine that 29 minutes is roughly halfway through the hour.
The way information is presented impacts how it is stored. If you look at a clock face and want to know what time it is it's very easy to visualize the passage of time as fractional because the time is presented to you without numbers being the primary focus and instead divisions. Mentally it is easier for you then to grapple with time as a fractional division. However, if instead of presenting the day as being divides into 2 portions of 12 hours, themselves divided into 12 subdivisions, those then further divided into 12 subdivisions of the 5tha of those divisions, you presented it as a simple read out the passage of time feels more like a linear stream mostly indistinguishable.
How we present time changes how we think about time, which then changes how we describe time.
Man language is cool...
what do you know about Marshall McLuhan? I'm hoping it's not very much, because you seem to be in a really good place to receive what he has to teach right now. Google the phrase "the medium is the message" if you'd like to know more.
I think it's because, visually, 3:15 puts the minute hand a quarter of the way around the clock face. Digital clocks don't have a corresponding visual.