10:15 on a Saturday night

[venta]

An important survey:

[Poll #1060840]

Yes, I know 12pm isn't a meaningful time. But people use it, so I want to know what is generally understood by it. If you want a box for "I wouldn't understand anything by it, because it's a stupid thing to say", then you can't have one; just imagine that the something happening is important and you're forced to take a guess.

Comments

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

If you're asking for a practical purpose I recommend the phrase '12 noon'. Everyone understands that.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Sensible discussion at Confusion at noon and midnight.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I am asking for a practical purpose. I want to know what other people mean when they don't use the phrase "12 noon" and when it isn't practical to ask them for clarification :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a decent consensus, although as usual a few awkward types!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I know that now. Y'know, it's almost like I was asking because I wanted to discover what the concensus was :p

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, clearly you were actually asking because you wanted to start a noonists vs midnighters flamewar.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It depends what it is. If they are referring to a meeting or a driving lesson they mean midday; if they are referring to a celebration of the new year or the clocks going back, they mean midnight Sunday-Monday.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It rarely matters that it's 'not meaningful' in the most pedantic sense - unless you want something to happen at exactly 12:00:00, people arriving at noon will probably arrive at 12:00:30 or later, which is most definitely after noon and thus PM is correct. There's only a split second every day in which there's any doubt. AM is morning and PM is afternoon, and anyone who's ever played a card game in which aces can be high or low should be able to cope with the idea of a sequence starting 12, 1, 2...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Presumably your case there is that 12:01pm is noonish, thus 12pm is close to it, and thus must also be noonish ? I wasn't unduly worried about the time at which there's any doubt. All I want to know is if someone says 12pm which 12 o'clock do they mean.

You see, if you look at it like that, you're correct that it doesn't really matter if it's meaningful. However, not everyone does - though it seems the split is less even than I expected, and I'm on the wrong side of it.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

The thing is it's not just 12:01 that's pm - it's 12:00:00.0000001 and so on - by the time you've seen that it's 12, it's pm.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I know someone who missed a wedding because of this confusion. He did think it was a bit odd for someone to get married at midnight, but it wasn't entirely ridiculous to think they might, since they were Goths and the wedding was happening at Whitby. Even worse, when he arrived at the church and found no-one there, he phoned the bride to ask what was going on. Who explained, rather grumpily, that the wedding had taken place at midday, the reception was over and she was rather busy, thankyou. ;-)

I tend to use noon / midday and midnight where possible, to avoid the confusion.

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

That's a brilliant story!

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, I know a goth who got married at Whitby. Wonder if it's the bride ... [grin]

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I would ask for clarification. But in the absence of either that or of clarification I might have to fall back on how much of a pendant the someone was.

I always get caught out by "Friday week," which other people use for 'not this Friday but the next one', I never use, and I frequently misinterpret as 'this Friday'. :-/

[reddragdiva]

PM starts at 12:00:00.0. AM starts at 00:00:00.0. Anyone claiming 12PM means "midnight" is being querulous.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm not being querulous. I'm just confused. 12pm to me always suggests midnight, though it seems I'm nearly alone in this.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, ok :-) To make it clearer:

Is 12:01:00 AM or PM? It's clearly PM.

Is 00:01:00 AM or PM? It's clearly AM.

12noon is PM because one INSTANT after 12:00:00.0000000 precisely it's PM.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can see the sense of looking at it like that.

However, one INSTANT before 12:00:00.0000000 precisely it's AM, so I've always regarded them as open intervals with the 12s belonging to neither set.

I guess it depends whether your background is in topology or something much more practical ;)

If nothing else, your explanation might at least mean I remember which way round the majority of people think it works.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Oi. My background's in topology :)

[rosenkavalier.livejournal.com]

It's always annoyed me - I know what convention says they should be, but it strikes me that midnight is both 12am and 12pm, and midday is neither...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Ah, but that's possibly missing the point.

Rather than asking "Which is correct?" venta asked "[What] would you think they meant?".

Although possibly it's a bit of an artificial problem anyway since as feanelwa points out above you can usually get the answer from context.

[hughe.livejournal.com]

no a boring, but related note, most car insurence and similar usualy starts from 12:01am just so there is no confusion that that is 1 minute after midnight

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I voted for noon being 12a.m. and midnight being 12p.m. - but that's partly because, with the hours I work (flexitime in a charity office), noon is only two hours after I've started, and therefore is still morning, so a.m. makes more sense. Even if it's not logical.

The way that I see it:
1159 = 11:59am
1200 = 12am, aka noon
1201 = 12:01pm
2359 = 11:59pm
2400 = 12pm, aka midnight
0001 = 12:01am

It is the 12th hour post meridian - after noon.

Then again, when it matters, I have a tendency to use the four-digit twenty-four hour clock, for this very reason. Or say "Noon".

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

As a real pedant, I find it uncertain. But the existence of this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12:00PM-1:00PM_(24_season_6) gave me a clue based on current pop culture.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

So few things happen at midnight, I'd assume they meant midday unless I had a really good reason not to.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

I thought that there wasn't any ambiguity because in clock lessons when I was small 12pm was noon and midnight is 12 am (or 00:00 on a 24 hour clock thus removing ambiguity). And that was official.

American official it turns out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock
Greenwich are more pedantic and say to be more specific :-)

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting, because I didn't realise there was any confusion. To me, noon is 12pm; midnight is 12am. I suppose that's because if 12:01 in the afternoon is "pm" then it makes sense that the entire hour is pm.

Whether it makes sense and whether it's correct are not necessarily the same, of course. It makes sense that the new century began at the start of 2000, but technically it began a year later, because the first year AD was 1 and the first century ran from 1AD to 100AD inclusive. This also bizarrely means that the last decade of the 20th century was 1991-2000, inclusive - presumably not the same thing as "the 90s".

But now you raise it, I suppose that if you regard "pm" and "afternoon" as synonymous, then noon must be am, because it is not _after_ noon. But what about this: if midnight between Saturday and Sunday is 12pm, what day is it? If you say it's still "pm" it makes sense to say it's still Saturday. But it seems totally weird if Sunday doesn't start dead-on midnight. And if Sunday does start dead-on midnight, then it's "pm" both at the start and the end, which doesn't seem right either.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I know 12pm isn't a meaningful time

It's meaningful, you just don't know the meaning...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Oh rly? What does the "m" in "pm" mean here?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Ya rly. I'm not arguing from etymology what it "should" mean, I'm arguing what it does mean. If you don't like it, take it up with ANSI (who specified the strftime %p format how it is for a reason), not me.

If you want a "what it should mean" argument, then my favourite is the following:

Clock time is always referred to with some granularity, usually a second or a minute. 12.00pm (or 12.00.00pm) in particular refers to a minute (or second) starting at the instant of noon. 100% of this duration therefore occurs "after noon".

However, that is not why it means what it means, it's just a mnemonic.

What does the "m" in "pm" mean here?

Literally it's latin for "middle of the day". If you want to get etymological, note that astronomically speaking this almost never occurs within one minute of 12pm, even when we're not in daylight savings time. In particular, the "middle of the day" is not the same as "the instant at which the sun is at maximum elevation", because sunrise and sunset drift by an appreciable amount each day (even at the equator, where they vary a bit thanks to the earth's varying angular velocity wrt the sun).

[ao-lai.livejournal.com]

I had to go with the consensus. 12am is clearly (well, to me) midnight, therefore 12pm is midday...