On Thursday, August 14, 2014 3:31:25 PM UTC-4, Bill Ghrist wrote:
On 8/14/2014 12:58 PM, micky wrote:
On Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:15:15 -0400, Retired wrote:
On 8/14/14, 10:34 AM, trader_4 wrote:
On Thursday, August 14, 2014 10:18:36 AM UTC-4, TomR wrote:
In ,
Percival P. Cassidy typed:
On 08/14/14 06:00 am, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
Most of us learned that in 5th grade or before. 12 AM is midnight.
12 PM is noon. There would be less confusion in the world with a 24
hour clock. We all know that 00:00 is 24:00
Then you learned wrong: the "M" in "AM" and "PM" is "meridiem" =
"midday" = "noon"; the "A" and "P" are "ante" (= "before") and "post"
(= "after"), respectively. So 12:00 (using the 12-hour clock) is
either noon or midnight,
.....and 12:00 AM is twelve hours before noon and
12:00 PM is twelve hours after noon.
But, if I use that reasoning, wouldn't 10:00 AM mean 10 hours before noon
and 11:00 AM would mean eleven hours before noon?
That's an interesting point. So 10AM is really what everyone calls 2AM.
You're right, if that's the system, more than just noon and midnight are
apparently wrong..... Oh my!
I took it more in the sense that we have a system where 12 is high noon,
11 is before it, 1 is after it, and the ante just means that we're talking
about the 11 before 12, not the 11 after it, which would be 11PM. But
if you take what he posted literally, it's as you say.
My view of the whole thing is that with the ante/post thing, 12 noon
and 12 midnight could be either or both. To avoid confusion, obviously
the world has settled on the convention that 12AM is midnight, 12PM is
noon. And it makes sense to me. As the day is progressing, it's
11AM, then noon. What would it make more logical sense to associate 12
noon with? The AM period which has just ended? Or the PM period, which
is just beginning? We're usually looking ahead, not back, so my vote
would be for noon to be 12PM. Seems like 99% of the world agrees.
Wikipedia covers the issue he
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hou...n_and_midnight
where, in part, it says:
"The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a usage
note on this topic: "By convention, 12 AM denotes midnight and 12 PM
denotes noon. Because of the potential for confusion, it is advisable
to use 12 noon and 12 midnight."
I've read before that this is a convention, that is, that it could have
worked either way but they arbitrarily chose this way.
But I don't think so
1:00 Post Meridiem is one hour after the middle of the day, and 12;01PM
is one minute after the noon.
So what about 12:00PM. Well that only occurs for an instant, a pico
second later, it's no longer noon. It is after noon. The entire
minute between 12:00PM and 12:01PM is after noon, afternoon, except for
the moment that is noon. Less than a pico-second. A time with no
length. Not a time period, not a period, just a time. That is noon.
Everything after that is PM.
So not a convention, but following clearly from the rest of the AM/PM
time system.
When I was a kid, there were no digital clocks or watches, so we learned
correctly that there is no such thing as 12:00AM or 12:00PM, only
midnight or noon. When digital timepieces came along, it was overly
complicated to design them to display "noon" or "midnight" for one
minute apiece each day, so now we have 12:00AM and 12:00PM. It seems
obvious to me that the convention of 12:00AM being midnight and 12:00PM
being noon is simply the result of how a digital clock works.
An interesting re-invention of history.
I've existed a lot longer than the digital watch and like Ed, I knew as
a kid that 12AM was midnight, 12PM was noon. It's hard to imagine that
with the 12 hour clock system, that dates back many centuries, the issue
of whether noon is 12PM or 12AM or neither, never came up and it took the
digial watch for that to happen. I suspect 12PM being noon was arrived
at shortly after the concept went into use. It certainly was what I grew
up knowing in the 60s, before digital watches.