morning short takes

[cellio]

Never try to visit a car wash on the first nice day in March. I'm glad I wasn't blocked in by the time I could read the sign a few cars up that said "45-minute wait from this point". (Well, the sign wasn't punctuated correctly, but I'm used to hyphen neglect.) I'm willing to live with filth for a little longer. :-)

I saw an odd traffic-light failure this morning. At one intersection (where visibility isn't the greatest to begin with), the red lights were out -- all of the ones I could see. But not the greens. They should kill the light entirely until they fix that; at least that way everyone gets a clue that something might be wrong, and maybe most drivers even know to treat the intersection as an all-way stop in that case.

Someone on the street asked me what time it was and I said "20 after 9". If it had been five minutes earlier it would have been natural to say "quarter after", but had I said "third after" he would have looked at me cross-eyed. I wonder what led to "quarter" and "half" being acceptable but not other simple divisions.

(I am reminded of a book -- I forget which -- that I read as a child, where the child protaganist thought that "quarter past" meant 25 minutes past, because there are 25 cents in a quarter-dollar.)

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I do say "a third past" or "a third to". But yeah, people do look at me cross-eyed. I figure I haven't much to lose, 'cause they do that a lot anyhow.

But I don't say "a fifth past" because in addition to making them look at me funny, it'd make too many people have to stop and think, and that would make it less of a shurtcut than just saying "twelve after".

[cellio]

I think it's reasonable to require round numbers (those ending in "0" or "5") for this exercise. People get scared of math otherwise, it seems.

[magid.livejournal.com]

No one says "a sixth after 3" instead of "10 past 3", though, even though it's round numbers...

[cellio]

Round numbers are necessary, not sufficient. :-)