And I must concur with Bill here. The main reason for the confusion in people's minds is that 'pm' makes a lot more sense when it means as Bill described below. However, on a different tone, I believe that the culprit for all this confusion has been the watch industry with its inability to produce in the early days a watch that would show 24 hours on it, i.e. that one would see a complete circle in one day as opposed to 2 circles. Some say that a real pure 24-h watch couldn't be reasonably produced in those days due to angles being too small for it (15 deg, instead of the present 30) and that esthetically the watch would be "hard to read". That's why they came with this "clever" (but to me, dumb! ;-) ) way of making watches walk 'twice as fast', so to speak. But perhaps other colleagues here may have other theories to explain the origin of this nagging 'tradition' of referring to time only as 12-h increments. To conclude, just for your info, people in Brazil have no clue about this am/pm business even though they overwhelmingly use 12-h formats in popular conversations. They simply say 'da tarde' beside the time to identify or differentiate it from 'da manha' which would be early hours past midnight. Marcus On Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:28:37 Bill Potts wrote: >Stephen: > >I have also held, for years, that if time is to be expressed in am and pm >terms (as is almost inevitable with traditional analog watches and clocks), >that midday should be expressed as 12:00 noon and midnight as 12:00 mid. > >However, if, for mechanical reasons, "noon" and "mid" are not possible, I >have further held that noon should be 12:00 am and midnight should be 12:00 >pm. As you or someone else mentioned, pm stands for "post meridiem" (not >post meridian, by the way). Midnight is, quite obviously twelve hours after >the meridian, so the use of 12:00 am is nonsensical. Noon is the culmination >of the ante meridiem period, for which all the other times are shown as am. > >Depending on the resolution of the clock, the second or the minute after >noon and midnight would be pm and am, respectively. > >I theorized, here (to several objections), that the use of am for midnight >and pm for noon started with the advent of digital clocks (specifically, the >early electromechanical ones). To show 12:00 noon as 12:00 am and 12:00 >midnight as 12:00 pm would have increased the complexity of the mechanism, >so the manufacturers compromised, as the error would only be visible for one >minute (or one second). > >My childhood memories (in England) are of a 12:00 pm midnight. I could also >have sworn that, at the time I emigrated to Canada (1957), that was also the >Canadian usage. I'm not sure whether or not Joe Reid every disputed that. I >believe Chris Keenan did. However, as he is much much younger than I am, his >experience is post-digital-clock. > >Someone argued, in this thread, that midnight should be 12:00 am, because >it's followed by 12:01 am. I would counter that it should be 12:00 pm, >because it immediately follows 11:59 pm. Both statements are equally valid >(or equally nonsensical, depending on where one is standing). > >The fact is, though, that we're stuck with a logically questionable >convention which is totally overcome by moving to the universal use of the >24-hour clock, running from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. I don't think anyone on >this list is going to dispute that. > >Bill Potts, CMS >Roseville, CA >http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf >Of Stephen C. Gallagher > Sent: July 26, 2001 04:41 > To: U.S. Metric Association > Subject: [USMA:14630] Re: Metric Marketing > > > I'm still puzzled by the comment that, in the US, midnight is > 12 AM and noon is 12 PM (which I know to be true), but in > "the rest of the world" it's the other way around. > > Which countries refer to midnight as 12 PM instead of 12 AM > and noon as 12 AM instead of 12 PM? > > Stephen > ----- Original Message ----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To: U.S. Metric Association > Sent: July 25, 2001 22:42 > Subject: [USMA:14619] Re: Metric Marketing > > > In a message dated 2001-07-25 08:15:35 Eastern Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > > If you want to get technical... > what does p.m. mean? post meridian. And as meridian is noon, 12 post > meridian or after noon would be midnight, or 24 hours. > On the other hand 12 a.m. (ante meridian) would be 12 hours before >noon, or > midnight, 0 hours. So I guess that it boils down to whether you want >the > midnight at the beginning of the day or the midnight at the end of the >day. > Even the Chicago Manual of Style says to use 12 m. (12 meridian) or 12 >noon > for noon. > > > If one is forced to stick with the 12-hour clock, then 12 am is midnight >and > 12 pm is noon. Reason -- > > 12 00 am is followed by 12 01 am; > 12 00 pm is followed by 12 01 pm. > > Just as 0000 is followed by 0001, and 1200 by 1201. > > In a pure sense, there can't be a 2400 because there is no 2401. > > In a few cases some people take 0000 to mean midnight at the beginning >of the > day and 2400 to mean midnight at the end of the day. But you have to >have a > defined point when one day ends and another begins, and the most logical >one > is > 23 59 59 to 00 00 00. > > Carleton > > Get 250 color business cards for FREE! http://businesscards.lycos.com/vp/fastpath/
