There's no such time as "12 AM" or "12 PM".

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It's "12 midnight" and "12 noon". "AM" stands for "before noon" and "PM" stands for "after noon". Noon can't be before or after itself and midnight is just as much after noon as it is before noon. So "12 AM" and "12 PM" don't make any sense.

No ... “A.M.” stands for “Ante Meridium”, meaning “Before Noon”, while “P.M.” stands for “Post Meridium”, meaning “After Noon”.

So, while it may be inappropriate to use A.M. or P.M. in reference to 12:00 Noon, either one seems perfectly acceptable when referring to 12:00 Midnight.

Personally, I prefer Military time ... 1:00 P.M. is 13:00, 2:00 P.M. is 14:00, et cetera.

Here that's called normal time and the A.M/P.M is stuff usually only used in English class.

Us Brits are largely to blame for that; we decided to be awkward in the early days of clock-making when the rest of Europe generally preferred the 24-hour system - then we exported the 12-hour system in everyday speech to our former colonies, which are pretty much still the only places where it's common. Sorry about that.

Are feet and miles also your fault?

(Ya I'm too lazy to google it.)

^ Well, we did spread our way of doing it, but every culture had their own pre-decimal measures at one time. You can blame the Romans for miles (from Latin "mille passus" - a thousand paces). It was the French who introduced the decimal system - they even tried doing it with time as well (10 hours per day of 100 minutes each, 10 day weeks, etc.), but that didn't catch on.

In a sense yes. The American system of measures (pound,onces, feet, miles) are the system we inherited from Britain. But every country had some kind of nondecimal system prior to the Metric system taking over most of the world in the last two centuries. So the real "blame" should be laid, not where we got the system, but on ourselves for continuing to use it when most of the rest of the world has gone metric.

All I know is that AM is in the morning and PM is in the afternoon. And that's all I need to know, since there's a big difference between getting up at 1:00 AM and 1:00 PM. Guess which time of day a loser like myself gets out of bed?

Speaking of which, why are people who sleep in late seen as being lazy but people who go to bed early are not? Why does it matter as long as you're both getting the amount of sleep you need?

Last edited by lostonearth35 on 20 Oct 2019, 1:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

If people use it in casual conversation, and people understand it without difficulty, then it "makes sense".


Don't be such a pedantic wag. And noon doesn't last an hour.

Maybe because of the phrase "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise". It may also be that some businesses only work & are only open in the mornings. Places are much more likely to be closed in the afternoon & open in the mornings than closed in the morning & open in the afternoon except for places to eat at & bars.

I have chronic delayed sleep onset disorder, so I know just what you mean. This cartoon that I saw recently summed it up perfectly, I thought (I've been jokingly compared to a vampire myself)...

[Credit: Buttersafe cartoon website]

Likewise. I value digital clocks more than the analogue kind. However, I do have a habit of reading 14:00 as 4:00 if I glance at the time quickly without much thought. I know that 14:00 is 2 P.M., but I still make that mistake if I'm in a quick-fire conversation on occasion. Then I quickly correct myself.

I prefer my phone over a watch. At least my phone never uses roman numerals to display the time, unlike certain wall clocks. However, if I do switch my phone to analogue mode it doesn't display any numbers, which is equally infuriating to me. My number averse brain already struggles to understand analogue sometimes, never mind without numbers or with roman symbols instead. In situations where someone asks me to tell them what time it is, and I'm not entirely sure what time it says on an analogue clock, I often take a sneaky peak at the digital clock on my phone. Admittedly, I'm a little ashamed whenever I have to resort to such methods. It's definitely an unfortunate moment if I'm in that situation and don't have my phone.

00:00 seems to make more sense to me than 12AM. However, whenever I make plans with someone I use analogue terms (e.g. Let's meet at 2 o' clock / 2 P.M.). I prefer it when people say 2:35 or 14:35, rather than "twenty five minutes to three". It takes me longer than it should to figure out what time that is. Darn dyscalculic brain.

Analog clocks seem to be going obsolete, at least in the United States. There are fewer and fewer analog clocks around as time goes by (no pun intended). Because of this, they are starting to no longer teach kids in school how to read an analog clock and people are growing up not knowing how to read one.

I relate to most of this. I don't think it's just cuz of my dyscalia. Probably a combo of that, my dyslexia, visual processing issues, & a low vision issue. One of my reports from elementary skewl said I had problems telling time. I think my problem was that on a lot of the tests they used analog clocks with pix instead of digital numbers. I get the hands mixed up. I have a hard time telling which is the small hand & which is the big one. I also have to count the minutes to figure out where the minute hand is. I'm able to count the minutes OK if I'm able to see the minutes & process where the hand is but it takes me a little time. After I graduated high-skewl I went to a facility for people with low vision to learn various life skills & things & the guy who did my main assessment when I got there commented on how one of my old skewl reports mentioned me having a hard time telling time. He asked me a few questions & then said I had no problem telling time. My problem is that I have low vision. Getting the hands & numbers confused with analog clocks when looking at them is common for people with vision issues. People with low vision can usually tell time fine if they have a talking watch or a digital clock where they can see the numbers. It's usually just the analog clocks that screw them up.

Really? Interesting. Personally, in the UK I still see a considerable amount of analogue clocks. Certainly enough for it to cause me issue. I remember back in school I'd run into problems in the reception area. When I was in secondary school, I sometimes had to sign an absence form (for trips to the doctor, etc) and I would have to write the time of departure. Unfortunately, there was only an analogue clock on the wall and I didn't want them to see me checking my phone for the time. However, sometimes I'd pause for so long trying to figure it out that I'd give myself away, and they'd try to quickly teach me how to read it. I'd like to note that I can sometimes understand analogue clocks, but it depends on what time the clock is portraying.

Both my primary and secondary were insistent on teaching us how to read both analogue and digital clocks. Although, neither of my schools were up to date as it were. My locker fell apart, we used old textbooks (that were sometimes the same ones my parents used) and watched old slightly broken tapes which were dated even when they first came out. Made for an amusing watch though, with the outdated slang and bad acting. In a similar vein, I remember getting a list of successful businesses to research. However, every company on the list had since gone bankrupt.

Analog clocks are far from being extinct....trust me!