If you read English texts written by native
speakers, you might have noticed that in most cases it's "one tenth of a
millimetre" instead of "0.1 millimetres", "one tenth of a
percent" instead of "0.1 percent" or "1 promille".
It's rare in other languages, but the English-speaking peoples seem to have
some kind of a problem with using numbers. Their clocktimes go: 10 o'clock, 11
o'clock, noon, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock etc. I used to think 13 was the unlucky number,
but have you ever heard an English speaker say "12 o'clock"? I'm not
sure I ever have. They go to such absurdities as writing that something is open
"9:00 a.m. – noon p.m. and 2:00 p.m – 4:00 p.m". The most ludicrous
case of the 12-taboo I've seen was a certain international organisation which
was offering a certain job and stated on their website that the deadline for
applying was "midnight, March 20". Now what the fuck is
"midnight, March 20" supposed to mean? Is it the midnight between the
19th and the 20th, or the midnight between the 20th and the 21st? What kind of
a moron could possibly ever choose to express time as "midnight"
instead of "0:00" or "24:00" which would be not only
unambigous but also shorter (4 or 5 characters instead of 8)?
The most baffling, though, is the
English-speaking people's obsession with the time of dawn. I'm hard pressed to
recall a non-English book or movie when someone agreed to undertake something
"dawn tomorrow" or "one hour after dawn" or such, but that
keeps happening all the time in English-language books and movies. It's just
too unreal. Do the native English speakers walk around with calendars all the
time? If you arrange to meet someone, why on Earth would you not simply say
"6:30" instead of saying "one hour after dawn" and assuming
it to be common knowledge that the sun will rise at 5:30?
It's not too bad when one is told to be
somewhere 1 hour after dawn – everything else failing, you can wait up
and watch the sun rise and then wait for another hour. But to arrange an
endeavour which needs rather exact timing to start "1 hour before
dawn" is obviously very stupid. How are your people supposed to be able to
tell in the middle of the night how much time is left until the sun will rise? Or
do they have special clocks in the English-speaking countries which don't show
the proper time early in the morning but indicate how long before or after dawn
it is? I doubt it. Why is it then that the English-speaking people do all they
can to avoid referring to the early hours of the day by hour and minute?
Probably the most ridiculous in that respect
was a story by a US author where people were on a long-distance train, and it
was important for the story to tell the reader when the train would stop where.
So the author made one character mention to another that the train will stop in
X-city at 3:30, in Y-city at one hour after dawn, and in Z-city at 11:15. I
couldn't believe I was reading that. I mean, of what use is such an information to the reader if he doesn't have the faintest idea what time dawn is in that particular part of the world at that particular time of the year – except that I assume that
it's sometime between 4 and 11 o'clock? To think of it, can you imagine that
there was a timetable on the wall of the train car with the text: "X-city
– 3:30, Y-city – dawn + 1h, Z-city – 11:15". I don't think there is a
train like that in the world. I am certain that the time of the train's arrival
in the Y-city was also typed as a standard clocktime with Arabic numbers. But
the writer felt he had to make the person who read that timetable convert the
clocktime into time relative to dawn, as if it were the natural way of
conveying that information to another person!
As I said, I keep seeing that kind of
mind-blowing absurdity in English-language fiction – and nowhere else.
I mean, in the latitude of London, sun obviously rises and sets at very different times during different seasons. So "dawn" is not exactly an astronomical certainty such as "noon", "midnight" or "tea-time". Why then does the English-speaking world have this obsession with counting time by something as unconstant as the dawn??
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