Times change

/ Jeff Cann

Half-past, quarter-till, five-of. These time-telling conventions I grew up with left the lexicon before my kids were born. But that never stopped me from using them:

Me: “I’ll pick you up at the tennis court at half-past.”
Sophie: “Half-past??!”

Me: “C’mon Eli, I want to get there by 6:00. It’s already five-of.”
Eli: “Five-what??!”

Me: “We’re meeting at the restaurant at quarter-to seven.”
Sophie: “No one says that anymore, dad. It’s six-forty-five.”

I got my first digital clock in high school, maybe around 1976. ‘Digital’ meaning the display showed hours and minutes in digits, not a clock face with hands. This isn’t the meaning of digital today, which pertains to binary code and computer technology. My first digital clock operated analog-ly. Numbers on small metal plates showed through a clear plastic screen. Every minute, the gearing inside the clock would force the next number to flip down. Every ten minutes, two plates flipped. At ten o’clock and one o’clock, both day and night, all four plates would flip simultaneously, making a whisper of a clickclickclickclick sound. At night, I laid in bed, breath held, straining to hear that sound—three or four plates dropping at once. How many times did I fall asleep two minutes before the hour anticipating this new and exciting event?

It’s impossible for me to write about this topic without mentioning the movie Groundhog Day. Daily, a close-up of Bill Murray’s digital clock radio—with metal numbers like I described—shows the time changing from 5:59 to 6:00. The radio pops on to play the trailing bars of the Sonny and Cher classic, I Got You Babe. Two radio DJs, wired on caffeine and god knows what else, energetically (obnoxiously) banter back and forth like only 1980’s radio personalities can. By the time Groundhog Day came out in 1983, the metal-plate digital clock was already outdated. The world moved on to LED clocks, truly digital, run by computer chips, not gears. It’s part of the joke, the audience is supposed to react “Heh, heh, remember those clocks?” That close-up view of the clock happens eleven times throughout the movie. The clock is one of the film’s main characters.

I’m old-school. We still have three analog clocks in my house. One on my back porch that chimes with a different bird call every hour. One in our family room that runs five minutes slow, even after we reset it. And one in the master bathroom that somehow manages to be set to Daylight Savings Time in the winter and Standard Time in the summer. It’s always an hour off, but I only look at that clock in the mirror when I shave, so I can never figure out what time it is anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong.

As a kid, all our clocks were analog—circular with moving hands, numbers representing hours surrounded the face. Nowhere did the clock portray minutes. The minutes were just something you learned as a child. I’m not sure this was true for everyone, but when thinking about time, I never thought higher than thirty minutes. In my house growing up, telling time went like this:

Five o’clock
Five-ten
Five-twenty
Five-thirty
Twenty-till-six
Ten-till-six
Six o’clock

Since my kids learned to tell time on digital clocks, saying five-fifteen makes sense to them. It shows those numbers right on the clock. Because the clock no longer looks like a pie, they never think in quarter hours. Quarter-past-five has become a meaningless phrase.

For me, old habits die hard. When my kids were tweens, we allowed them iPods for a few years before we deemed them old enough to own cellphones. Only I always called their iPods, Walkmans. “Hey put down your Walkman and come help me rake the yard.” This always spurred a bout of good-natured snickering. “Walkman? Dad, this isn’t the fifties.”

Cue my fatherly lecture: “No, son, the first Walkman didn’t come out until 1979…” I never told them that prior to the Walkman, my only portable music device was a transistor radio with a single ear plug. Headphones then were still the big, bulky things that music lovers have returned to over the past eight to ten years.

I find it curious how some phrases endure—ringtones, when was the last time you heard a phone ring, rolling down your window, calling a movie a film—while other phrases become passe. I’ll never condition myself to say five-fifty-five. That will forever be five-of-six to me. I suspect that by the time the last of the boomers die out, counting down to the next hour, twenty-till, ten-till, five-of will forever disappear. We’ll lose this elegant convention and simply blurt out the numbers shown on the digital clock—just another sad casualty of the modern era.

30 thoughts on “Times change”

  1. Yay! You’re back! I’m admiring how you move from one paragraph to the next in this. The first sentence of each paragraph renews attention and creates new interest.

    Coincidentally, when my retirement was celebrated at my university a few weeks ago, the gift they gave me was an analog clock. What an odd looking thing it is, like a relic from the past. And why do they give retirees clocks? To remind us that we’re old, and our time is running out?

    Hope you’ll be posting more soon.

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    • We’ll see how back I am. I really struggled with this post. I’ve been really busy, but I wonder if part of it is I’m just having trouble writing right now. When I went *on* my Tourette medication back in 2016 my writing really stalled. Now that I’ve gone *off* I’m experiencing the same thing. I shouldn’t be surprised, there are noticeable changes going on in my brain. We’ll see how I progress. Yes, a clock is a pretty dull gift. Maybe a 1 year subscription to NYT would be more meaningful for a writer with extra time on her hands.

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    • So well stated, Georgia!

      As for the analog clock, Jeff, if you want to blow your kids’ minds next time they say that things from the are no longer used, ask them why an hour has 60 minutes, and share with them how we’re still being influenced every day, every time we call out the time, by civilizations from over 4,000 years ago (Sumerians/Babylonians), not just by what happened just over 40 years ago: I can’t wait to hear you describe their jaw-drop 🙃

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  2. I’m going to start paying attention to how I express the time of day – I don’t have kids, so nobody has pointed out if I’m doing it the “fifties” way! That “digital” clock that flipped the numbers – my parents had that one. I thought, at age 9, that it was “atomic.” The atomic clock. Eventually the clock-radio my dad got for my room had mechanical numbers too, but they rotated with a sort of slow grinding sound.

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    • Maybe what I described as a whisper-clickclickclick was more of a crunchcrunchcrunch. It was a very long time ago. Being an “old dad” my way and my kids’ way clashed quite often. Happily, we all kept our sense of humor about our differences. I’ll be sure to point it out when they start getting stuck in their ways.

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    • You know, I once read that in the move to digitizing cockpits, they moved the larger, analog displays, to less space-consuming and more “accurate” digital displays. It turned out to be a nightmare for the pilots. They used to be able to scan the displays quickly and see if something was out of whack. But with digital, they had to read every single reading, which took much much longer. Turns out you can see “a quarter to” much faster than read 6:45. Who knew analog had hidden benefits?

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      • Yes, another commenter brought this up as well. There are few times in my life that an approximate time isn’t good enough. I’m perfectly happy with analog clocks. In fact, any clock in our house that’s digital is built into an appliance or a device (except alarm clocks).

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  4. I’m a Boomer and have not heard that people today don’t know what a quarter to five means. I still see analog clocks in stores, hair salons, etc. But you made me think on something I hadn’t thought of before—How what we experienced growing up is foreign to our grandchildren today. Love this post!

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  6. I like analogue clock faces. They are quicker to read than a digital face. With digital, you have to be able to actually read the numbers whereas with analogue just a momentary glance will give you enough information to determine the time – perhaps not to the minute, but close enough for most situations. My digital watch has an analogue face 😀

    Interestingly here we used “past” as the minute hand moved away from the hour towards the “6”, and “to” as it towards the next hour. We did hear “till” in some movies, but I was puzzled what “five-of” was until you provided the answer. We tended to use “quarter past”, “half past” and “quarter to” when the time didn’t need to be absolutely precise – plus or minus 5 minutes was neither here nor there. We’d say “fifteen past” etc if it was necessary to be more precise.

    Your mention of “ringtones” reminds me that here in Aotearoa, we “ring” someone on the telephone, and it’s only quite recently that “phone” and “call” have started to be used, mostly by the younger generation.

    When I was a kid, we went to “the pictures”, and I don’t ever recall hearing the term “movie” used except while watching a “picture”. I’m not sure when “movie” fell into general use here. We “looked at a picture” if it was still such as a photograph, but “watched a picture” if it was a “film” or “motion picture”. I continue to be fascinated by how language evolves from generation to generation, and there are now some words I still regularly use that have been replaced at least twice by younger generations.

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    • I find it kind of sad that American expressions invade your culture. I realize that a lot of that is due to movies. I’d much prefer that countries had their own lingo. I absolutely love it when I learn a new phrase (usually from an Australian blogger). I have found myself adopting some of the international lingo I’ve learned here on WordPress. My fave is spitting the dummy.

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      • I think we still have enough expressions to confound any non-Kiwi. We do use spitting the dummy but not as much as the Aussies. We do have another expression that can mean expressing sadness or displeasure strongly, and that is packing a sad. And like many Kiwi expressions it has an alternative meaning. It can also refer to something breaking down or stopping working, as in “My car – she packed a sad this morning” (note the use of the female pronoun). And if it’s beyond repair you would say that the car is munted

        But even more Kiwi is ending a sentence with as. It’s used as a sort of incomplete comparative. For example “She’s hot as” could mean it’s a very hot day, or you’re referring to a very attractive woman. “It’s suss as” means that something appears to be very suspicious. Perhaps its most common usage is in sweet as which means sure, excellent, or no problem as in “Can I have oat milk instead of regular?” “Sweet as!” Many North American visitors mis-hear this as “Sweet ass” and become quite offended, not realising that we refer to that part of the body as arse 🤣

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  7. I still use all those phrases… roll down the window, ring tone, movies… that might be a regional thing 🤷🏼‍♀️ and the clock references. My millennial kids never corrected me and I’ve actually heard them use the same phrases.

    One of Ben’s IEP goals was learning to read a clock face. Luckily it coincided with a Big Ben fascination 😂

    What still surprises me the most is that cursive writing is no longer taught in school. I can kinda understand… it’s no longer used, but how do people sign their names? Are we going back to using an X?🙄

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    • My 8th grade science teacher suggested I stop writing in cursive because he couldn’t read it. I haven’t written anything (except my signature) in cursive since. Like I said to someone else, it might just be my kids pushing back against my clock phrases. DD let me know they are still in heavy use in AUS. Big Ben IS pretty cool.

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  8. I’m going to continue to tell the time as five past ten til and half past whatever hour and people can keep or not. I even changed my dumb smart watch to an analog face to make life easier. These anachronisms are charming and life affirming. I’ve even found myself correcting 9:50 to 10 to 10 on occasion just to confuse the youngsters at work. Oh what it is to be unique. Or as some coworkers call me old man.

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  9. i’m just now realizing i don’t have a single clock in my home– unless you count the digital clock on the stove/microwave. i generally rely on alexa– or my cellphone– to give me the time (and to wake me up).

    but i do remember the “flipper” dial clock i had in highschool … good times! 🙂

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  10. I’ve been watching the TV series Loki and this post made me think of that show and one little character in it.

    Miss Minutes. Miss Minutes is a cartoon analog artificially intelligent clock that runs as a liaison between two of the character. She also spreads the TVA’s (Time Variance Authority) propaganda all while secretly hatching her own plan for dominance. The show is awesome.. it surreal in that it’s futuristic but not??

    Remember when teachers in grade school would ask you to write or draw a picture of what you thought the future would look like?? Soo… it’s like that. 50s representation of the future. Very Star Trekish 😆

    Anyway, I had a point to all of this… Miss Minutes design her look is very retro cartoon but she’s the company’s A.I. which I found very interesting. She has no variant in the show… she can run through all the time lines as she is and keep up with the changes and even… create changes. I think if stuff like her actually existed… an A.I. clock that literally manages time we’d be in trouble. With the way things are going we may yet see some iteration of Miss Minutes.

    It took me a while to pick up on the clock speak when I was little. When I got my first watches I was the happiest camper because the deal was that I had to how to convey time on an analog clock before I could have the Swatch and a digital Casio with the little calculator function on it. I did so successfully and when I got my watches I was thrilled. There’s one analog clock in the house and it rests in the kitchen. It ticks simultaneously with the faucet drip quite loudly and both are quite annoying. But it’s accurate. Now the digital clocks on the microwave, stove, and coffee maker… smh they read different times. Might be a sign to replace them. Maybe their time’s run out?

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