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

[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).