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  • YaksterYakster Posts: 27,586 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I used to make a habit of asking people I knew for the time after they looked at their watch and most of the time they had no clue. That was before smart watches and smart phones, now they're not always looking at the time.

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  • silvermousesilvermouse Posts: 20,826 ✭✭✭✭✭

    interesting. I prefer analog to digital, it is more spacial ... it's about twenty-of as opposed to ;.. it's nine thirty-nine. The digital gets turned into words, the analog not so much.

  • YaksterYakster Posts: 27,586 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I used to use this program called qt that would spit out the approximate time like quarter til 12 instead of a digital result. This was on a Unix workstation.

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  • Bob_LukenBob_Luken Posts: 10,717 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Maybe it's a regional thing, but I don't remember anyone in my upbringing that used the word "of" when telling time or made any effort to teach me to do so. I did hear it from time to time. Initially, if someone said "It's a quarter of noon" I wouldn't have known the difference between 11:45am and 12:15pm. And then when I did learn what "of" meant in expressing time, I didn't feel like it made any sense anyway. Why would fifteen minutes prior to an hour be considered "of" the hour I'm trying to refer to? That 15 minutes belongs to the previous hour. It shouldn't be credited to the following hour. Still makes no sense.

  • silvermousesilvermouse Posts: 20,826 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited December 2022

    It is an extremely flexible preposition.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of

    11
    a
    —used as a function word to indicate the position in time of an action or occurrence
    died of a Monday

    b
    BEFORE
    quarter of ten
  • Bob_LukenBob_Luken Posts: 10,717 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I did some googling and found a brief reference to the possibility that it could be a shortened phrase. "Ten shy of noon". That would make more sense to me if it were the case.

  • silvermousesilvermouse Posts: 20,826 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yes. The modifier makes it more clear, grammatical shorthand, perhaps regional.

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