Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
Let’s go out to eat, I made reservations for 7.
Are we having breakfast or dinner?
Without context, tough to tell. That’s why 24hr is superior.
Except that’s not actually an issue in practice. In a real-world conversation you would disambiguate with “Let’s get breakfast” or “Let’s get dinner” if you’re not referring to the immediate future. I honestly can’t think of a single time that I’ve been genuinely confused in this way.
Because over here, it’s generally only the military that uses 24-hour time and where most people learn it.
24h
Just remember, civilian Americans aren’t the one who named the time system that includes “Oh Six Hundred Hours” Military Time. It was the Goddamned Military. And when the Goddamned Military fucking tells you what something is called, you fucking call it that. No questions.
So we could flip our clock displays to 24 hour time and meet at 14 o’clock, but we’d still be civilians and unworthy to use Military Time. So why bother? Working 9 to 5 is bad enough, working 9 to 17 sounds too fucking exhausting.
as an american i must say i HATE this as well. people ask me why i use military time and i say it’s because there are 24 hours in the day so it makes much more sense to me. and that in other parts of the world they call it international time with the military having nothing to do with it.
makes me wanna scream. thank you for letting me go off.
Knowing Americans they would’ve rejected it if it wasn’t called military time. In fact I reckon if you guys rebranded metric system to military measurements there might be more acceptance to it.
I keep telling people metric time is where it’s at but they just look at me like I’m crazy
obviously we should all just switch to metric time lmao
Time is not metric
Just to be devil’s advocate:
Time is not really not metric, either, to be absolutely fair. The 60/60/24 thing is mostly just a continuation of the sexagesimal system used by the Babylonians.
There are also plenty of instances in history where civilizations used a decimal system of timekeeping. Just a summary of the Wikipedia page on the matter below:
- Egypt: used in astronomy, the decade, equal to 10 days, with 3 decades per solar year, with an added 5 intercalary days at the end.
- China: the shi and ke, equal to 1/10 of a solar day & 1/100 solar day, respectively, though this has gone in and out of favor with and without modifications due to China having a long-ass (and thus varied) history.
- Revolutionary France: 10 days per week, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. (Although, to be fair, most common people ignored it and just used the sexagesimal time base they had always been used to. Lol.)
Alternatively, if you make the decimal second equal to 0.8640… SI seconds, then that would allow you to have 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 10 hours per day, and still have clocks align with the solar day.
Hell, even our definition of the second is merely the number of “pulses” (word used for brevity’s sake) of the Cesium-133 atom that corresponds to how long our second is. In other words, our definition of the second isn’t based on objective truth; we just found an objective way to define the system we already use. Lol.
Mind you, I’m merely playing devil’s advocate here. As much as I love the SI, and the metric system in general (both modern and previous versions), and would not be opposed to switching to decimal time if mandated, I’m okay with the system we have now. I JUST FUCKING WISH WE ALL USED 24H FORMAT GODDAMMIT THE AMBIGUITY OF 12H TIME PISSES ME OFF JUST FUCKING WHY GODDAMN IT nearby explosive barrel explodes from proximity to blood vessels
tl’dr: Our conception of time as sexagesimal, and even based on the Cs-133 atom, is not quite as objectively based as one might be led to think. Also, fuck 12h time.
Good comment. Thanks!
Isn’t the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Also: english could be renamed to common and it would make sense.
Isn’t the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
If we were to redefine the second as 0.864 SI seconds, then the new second would be defined as the time it takes light to travel 0.864x the current meter. Of course since the modern definition of the meter is defined as a light-second, changing the definition of the second would also change the definition of a meter. (One thread loose pulls another thread loose and all that jazz…) My point being that these are merely objective ways to define the units we already use, not objective proofs of said units.
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Although that would be absolutely fantastic in my opinion, there are uses to time zones. Most people’s sleep cycles are naturally calibrated to light levels, which vary from time zone to time zone. Originally, time zones were split into equal divisions of latitude across the globe 15° apart, for this exact reason, it being the most logical way to divide them by.
What I just want is nations to stop fucking this up by using nationality and cultural reasons to have vastly separate areas abide by the same time zones. I mean, for fuck’s sake, here is what they used to look like; here is what they are now. Good gods is that a complete clusterfuck… I mean, seriously, China used to be four time zones; now they’re one!
If we just used UTC people on Europe could sleep from 23:00 to 7:00, people from Japan could sleep from 15:00 to 22:00 and so on. There would be no need to “localize” time.
I remember hearing an anecdote that (I forget which band) got signed because they misunderstood the record producer when they requested a demo at 8 and showed up ready to play psychedelic rock at 8oclock in the fuckin morning
Pshh I bet you use acoustic time.
Not sure if you’ve had the same experience but I had an American colleague ask me what I meant when I didn’t give the time in the 12hr format. The message was something like, “I’ve booked the meeting for 14:00”
Similar things happen to me. All of my devices are in Spanish in addition to 24hr, so anything automated is sent in Spanish to my non speaking colleagues
Oh wow. That explains a lot. I always thought that when Americans said “military time”, they meant Zulu time, that is 24h time UTC.
TIL it’s just sparkling 24h local time.
Glad I’m not the only one. I also thought “military” was always UTC and “24” was local time.
Americans are stupid when it comes to converting 24hrs “Militery time” to 1 pm, 2 pm, ext. making them all confused.
My company used to always use 24hr time when we were using a DOS based system. Then we upgraded to Windows Server 2009 and everything changed to 12hr. I preferred the 24hr. There were less mistakes.
Different places have different cultures and traditions. In the US, 12hr time is standard. 24hr time is used mostly by the military.
There are certainly arguments for why 24hr time is a better system. That doesn’t make it stupid to continue to use a slightly inferior system. Most cultures don’t try to adapt best practices from around the world.
Ignorance is not stupidity.
Local or Zulu?
Here in California, I’ve heard both “military time” and “24 hour time” used interchangeably for writing the time as “03:45” or “16:20”. That said, I’ve heard – citation needed – that proper military time does not use the colon, such as “1600”, pronounced as “sixteen hundred hours”.
As for why the public might refer to this generally as “military time”, it may just be that that’s the most common, well-known use-case in the States, outside of the sciences. I personally use 24 hour to time on all my devices, but I’ve come across many people who prefer clockfaces or AM/PM, probably out of habit.
I’ve heard the same with regards to proper military time not having the colon.
In Switzerland it works like that too.
“Normal time” for us is 24h with colon so 18:00
While “Military time” is without colon, so 1800 and is then pronounced as achtzehnhundert (eighteen hundred).
We don’t use colons in our time in the American hospital system. We use them for a lot of other things though. (Pun)
It took me a second to realise what the pun was…
It is literally a foreign concept to the vast majority of them (only other countries use it widely in everyday life) and the military is one of the very few contexts in which they will experience it.
It’s just another term for it. 🤷♂️
Because the average American is much more likely to bump into American military personnel than people from countries that use 24 hour time. It’s really as simple as that.
And this isn’t because we’re uncultured swine, it’s because we’re separated by two oceans from most countries.
Australia has entered the chat
Australia isn’t real.
Paradise, Heaven, Eden, Australia, whatever it is.
not mutually exclusive
Its because in America most people’s only experience with it is when the movie says “meet here at 0700 hrs.” Really isn’t much deeper than that, we also call “ranger green” “ranger green” whether an army ranger is wearing it or not, despite it really being “just a shade of green.” Sometimes things are just called things.
“Ranger Green” the hell is that?
I’m an army veteran and I’ve never heard that term. Army Green, yes, but that’s pretty rare, too.
What color even is “Ranger Green” other than OD?
Do I look like a swatch to you?
It’s called genericide. They encounter the 24 hour measure of time primarily through the US military and its service members so all 24 hour time generally gets called military time.
Similar to why facial tissue is often Kleenex or adhesive bandages are Band-aids in the US.
Our country is so big and heavily populated (and most of our many, many populated areas are overshadowed by a few really touristy places like New York, the Disney parks and Yellowstone National Park and Hawaii which isn’t even that American) and that you’ll rarely encounter someone from a country that uses the 24 hour system. Canada uses the 12-hour clock if I remember correctly from when I last went there, and I think Mexico does since we usually learn their dialect of Spanish in school (but I’m not sure, in all my spanish classes they taught us to say “son las ocho y media en la noche” for 8:30 PM, instead of “veinte y media horas” as I was taught when I studied in Spain for a semester)
Quebec uses 24h, rest of Canada uses 12h.
