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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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.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
quarter of ten
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.
Yes. The modifier makes it more clear, grammatical shorthand, perhaps regional.
Took me a minute
I know, You're a big dog and I'm on the list.
Let's eat, GrandMa. / Let's eat GrandMa. -- Punctuation saves lives
It'll be fine once the swelling goes down.
I smell a lawsuit
Got a text at work when it was 33- 0 from a friend that hates the Vikings. Always fun to reply to those kinds of texts.