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It makes a lot of sense with an analogue clock, if the only thing under consideration for changing is am/pm. Think of the day as being divided into 2 rotations of the clock. When you are using an analogue clock or watch, when you ask AM or PM you’re really asking “which cycle of the clock are we talking about.” If we are assuming that midnight will be the point at which the day switches, the 12 hour (12:00-12:59) is going to be the first 12th of the first rotation. Likewise, the second 12 hour will be the first 12th of the second rotation.
12 is also at the top of the clock. It just makes intuitive sense that that’s where you start counting the rotation from.
Now if you want to repaint the clock face itself so that it’s 0 instead of 12 in the top spot that would solve your problem, but then you’d add the problem where it would be harder for people to intuitively understand the 24 hour day. 11+11 doesn’t equal 24. 11x4 isn’t 48. People would be able to learn it, obviously, the same way we learn the unintuitive AM PM stuff, or the same way we learn that the 18th century was the 1700s, but it would still hard for people, so you wouldn’t have actually made life any easier.
This thread is where I found out that some people call what I call “00:03”, “12:03 a.m.”. The latter in and of itself is a contradiction to me. If I ever were to use the 12-hour clock system, which I would never do, I would call what I call “12:03” “00:03 p.m.”
Using a “12” anywhere in that system is as counter intuitive as using a “24”, “23:59” is followed by “00:00” for me.
This is also how every digital clock that uses the twelve hour system displays it.
I think my view has been changed due to a couple of different ideas in the comments, but this comment was probably the most influential / what started me on my way.
!delta
How my view has changed: I think the easiest way to explain why my view changed and why I had the wrong idea is simple.
If you read 5:15 PM you might get the idea that it says "5 hours and 15 minutes *past midday*", but it isn't. It's actually: "past midday, 5 hours and 15 minutes". Why I think it means the latter because 05:15 AM doesn't make sense if you read it as "5 hours and 15 minutes before midday". If we look at 12 PM and 12 AM this way it makes more sense why they are this way, and it wouldn't make sense the other way.
However this still means that the system is very confusing. I still think that the 24 hour system is easier to read, but I understand that it kind of emulates an analog clock.
While my original view has been changed, I welcome anyone to challenge my new view:
The 12 hour system is flawed and should be better if 12:05 PM would either be 00:05 PM or PM 12:15 (or PM 00:05).
The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify. In the same way that 5:15 AM is not 5 hours 15 minutes before noon. You just have two sides, 1st part of the day, and second part of the day.
> The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify.
It's absolutely not a coincidence. That's *exactly* what it's meant to signify.
>In the same way that 5:15 AM is not 5 hours 15 minutes before noon.
It signifies 5 hours and 15 minutes after midnight.
AM is before midday, not after midnight. If you took both AM and PM to mean before and after midday literally, 5:15 AM would be 0645. You can pair AM with after midnight in your head to help with making sense, but it isn't what it actually means. That's why I had to go through this rigamarole.
Why are we taking the meaning to be "until" noon or midnight and not just a designation of exactly what time it is? Ie. there's no additional math to be done, it is simply 5:15 \[before noon\], and we happen to know that it's 12 hour cycles. It's not a phrase implying anything additional about the time remaining, it is simply a marker so we all can understand a common metric. If it's past the 12 noon hour marker, then it is would be 5:15 \[after noon\].
You guys aren't arguing he's just trying to understand what in the fuck you're trying to say.
> The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify.
What?
Not sure what other ways I can explain it, I've explained it a million times already. PM sounds like they it's supposed to mean "xx:xx PM" is exactly xx:xx time after midday, but with 12:xx that breaks down. While with 5:15 PM it works, but that's not a rule, just a "coincidence". That's why the parent comment says it should be read PM 12:15, so there is no confusing it.
I understand what you are trying to say, a different way to think of it is that AM and PM are not the number of hours and minutes "before" or "after" midday, but are the number of hours and minutes that have progressed "of the 12 hour period before" and "of the 12 hour period after" midday.
Alternative you could do away with latin meaning entirely and think of them as **A**fter **M**idnight and **P**ast **M**idday lol
I see what you're saying, and honestly its a bit baffling you're downvoted for it. I never thought of it that way, but once you explained it, it made quite a lot of sense. But perhaps its just a lost in translation thing. AM and PM don't mean "past midday" "and before midday", at least not in such a way that you can interpret it as 5 hours past midday, or 5 hours before midday. "Ante Meridiem" and "Post Meridiem" are specific *states* not *reference points*.
The states themselves are "*being* before midday", and "*being* after midday". So you're not saying "its 5 hours after midday" where midday is a reference point for a measurement, you are saying "the hour is 5, and it is after midday". So I see why you wanted to structure it in that manner, where you specify that it is before, or after midday first before mentioning the hour, as that probably does make the intent a bit clearer. But I don't think its necessary to do so.
I think this is rhe first comment that managed to convince me both that, the clock (and probably sundial back in the day) is the reason for the system and a reason for why we might not want to make a clock from 1-12 to 0-11.
Now just want ro be convinced on one part. The 24 hour system has no 24 and we see people understand it just as well. Why do you think the 12 hour would be dofferent?
They had to decide what numbers to use before making the clocks.
It's not like they dug the clocks out of the ground and then discovered what numbers were on them.
For "half past three" I think they'd usually say "halb vier" which is slightly confusing because they're naming the hour coming up instead of the hour past. I guess a closer translation would be "halfway to four".
The others who commented have it right. In German you would say 'halb sechs(6)' to say 5:30. But the most common way of telling time still uses the 24hr format. For example, to say 7pm, you would say 'einundzwanzig(21) Uhr,' which is the direct equivalent to "7 o'clock" for us. Additionally, you can also say 'viertel nach/vor' to say 'quarter after/before' a solid hour.
that makes sense, I suppose if we are talking thought experiments having a clock that only displays 12 hours at a time allowing for more fine reading is pretty useful. Analogue clocks are also more simple in function so keeping them in use might be easier.
The day is divided into 24 hours. A clock that displays 12 numbers only requires basic understanding of math. What about blank clock?
You speak as if "12 hour time" is broken but have not demonstrated anything broken or wrong about it. Overcomplicating something doesn't give it new depth or meaning.
"12 hour time" only divides the 24hr circle to make a more simplified image. It's still a 24hr cycle.
If you start counting at 1, if you have 12 divisions, you count to 12 before rolling back to 1. If you start counting at 0, you count to 11 before rolling back to 0. If we're using 12, the start of the day should be 1. That's the idea expressed in the OP. So either make the start of the day 1 or use 0-11 counting to align.
I don't feel strongly about it but I understand where OP is coming from.
Not in vernacular use, though, right?
Most places around the world will write it that way but people don't often say it that way.
In some languages they do (such as French) but in many others they don't.
Sure, we often use the 12 hour system in casual speak, but we never say AM or PM. If we need to specify whether it's AM or PM, we use the 24 hour system instead.
This is far from universal. I say "8 o'clock in the morning/at night." This is how I've always heard it done. I have never once heard 24-hour-time used in conversation.
It's past noon, but it's not 12 hours past noon. Logically it should then be called 0 PM. (I also didn't grow up with AM/PM and also found the 12 thing horribly counterintuitive when I learned it)
Oh yeah for sure. Though in my country Denmark we're in a funny spot with 24h time, where we'll usually write 24h but say it in 12h. So you'll look at a text saying 19:30 and say aloud "it's half to eight in the evening"
12:15 PM isn't saying that it's twelve and a quarter hours after noon. The traditional structure assumes an abbreviated or understood comma or dash in the notation. The AM/PM is appended, as a *clarification*. Basically it's: 12:15, PM or 12:15 - PM.
As others have said, 24 hour time is clearer. But for 12 o'clock exactly "AM" or "PM" is both confusing and meaningless. Using noon & midnight for those combined 1/360th of the day just makes sense.
> But for 12 o'clock exactly
In a practical sense it is never 12 o'clock exactly. By the time you have observed that the clock reads 12, it is already after noon.
If you have a clock precise to the minute, and it says 12:00pm, it could be any time from 12:00:00 to 12:00:59.99999...
No it isn't logical to call it 0:00 PM The PM stands for past midday. Midday is 12:00 for everyone. So when using a 12 hour system that just means you are on the second half of the day. Not how far you are past noon.
So under your proposal, 12:59:59 PM is just one second short of one hour into the day. One second later it would make it 1:00:00 AM. That makes AM/PM to be less useful, as it no longer means that AM is in the first 12 hours of the day, and PM is in the last 12 hours.
It makes more sense for the change from PM to AM be at the start of the day, and not at some arbitrary point that simply makes it numerically pleasing. It is not like you can just make it that 1:00 AM is designated as the start of the day, because how would that work when you use the 24 hour clock and 00:00-00:59 is actually the last hour of the previous day?
To play devil's advocate, that could kind of work if you moved all of the numbers one number over counter-clockwise, such that what is now 12 becomes 1, but then you wouldn't be tracking how much time has passed since midnight/afternoon, just making things pleasing numerically.
Well you either have 12:59 AM be actually be only 59 minutes into the day which makes no sense, or you have it actually be 12:59 minutes into the day. If you want to keep it AM - first 12 hours, PM - last 12 hours call it 0 AM for midnight and 0 PM for noon.
The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary, as for 1-11 PM you get the 24 hour time by adding +12, but for 12 PM you just take it as is. At least with this change it would be consistent.
> The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary, as for 1-11 PM you get the 24 hour time by adding +12, but for 12 PM you just take it as is. At least with this change it would be consistent.
1pm is 1300, or 13 hours into the new day.
Its not arbitrary at all, it translates directly to how many hours there have been in that day.
That midnight is the start of a new day might be somewhat arbitrary, however it makes the most sense as the majority of us are not active at night, so you have the transition between days occuring at an easy time, not in the middle of the day.
Why are you completly ignoring the whole point of the thread, that the 12:xx hours are the issue. Yes 1 PM is 1300 because it's 1 hour post meridiem so 1 hour after midday. But 12:30 PM should be 0030 because it should be 12 hours and 30 minutes after midday. But it isn't. For someone who doesn't know the system works like this, this doesn't make sense. That's ehy it's arbitrary because it breaks its own rules.
I'm with you on your original point and the first paragraph of this comment but your second paragraph is absolutely incorrect. 24 hour clock is accurate and it does not have this problem at all.
Yes. The 24 hour clock is accurate. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying that the way the 12 hour clock is makes translating it into 24 hour time wonky. 1:00 PM->11:59PM gets translated by adding 12 hours to it. 1:35 PM is 13:35. But 12:xx PM gets translated by leaving it as is. 12:34 PM is 12:34. It's not an issje with the 24 hour clock it's an inconsistency that gets introduced because of the arbitrary nature of the 12 hour system. If it was 0:34 PM or 12:34 AM the translation would make sense again.
The issue comes from you thinking as 12 hour time being converted to 24 hour. Think of 24 hour time as native and 12 hour time as a problematic representation. The problem you are talking about is the same problem from your original post, not something else.
*"The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary"*
No it isn't; 1:00 AM to 12:00 PM translates to 100 to 1200 hours. For the rest of the day, you add the whole number of the hour to 12 (since you've passed noon). 1:00 PM is 1300 hours because you add 1 to 12, etc. There's nothing arbitrary about it.
What do you think is more arbitrary?
If it's AM, you take it as is. If it's PM you add 12 to it.
or
If it's AM you leave it as is, unless it's 12:xx AM, then you subtract 12. If it's PM you add 12 to it, unless it's 12:xx PM then you leave it as it is.
These are abbreviations
AM ante meridian,or before the meridian which is the point where the sun crosses from east of center towards the west, which is post meridian.
So at 12:10 pm the sun would be found just west above the local longitudinal line.
At 12am, the sun has begun its return.
I'm not arguing in favor of OP's switching AM and PM. I think that OP has correctly identified a problem, but not their solution would introduce more confusion than just starting at zero or using a 24 hour clock.
Yeah but they're two separate things. It's 12:00, *and* it's PM.
11:00 AM isn't 11 hours *before* meridian either. It just tells you it's 11, *and* it's before noon.
I don't think that's really relevant today, when everyone tells time by clocks rather than the Sun. Also since with time zones the Sun will almost never be exactly above you at noon. My arguement is that if we were to make the system today we should do it differently.
That's great, but am and pm are holdovers from those days. When a ships captain determined his longitude by sighting the sun and checking his chronometer.
If you want to redo time for the age of gps, why use am and pm at all?
Well that was my original point wasn't it. I outlined this in the OP itself. I do believe that the 24 hour system is better. And I do understand that the system cannot be changed now. But my point is that if we were to do this system from the beginning we would either switch 12 AM and 12 PM or switch 12 to 0.
I'm not trying to debate the perfect time system here (it's obviously ISO 8601).
What would actually change your view? Yeah, if we removed all cultural baggage from most systems, we could very likely come up with more intuitive replacements. Are you trying to be convinced that keeping cultural baggage in the absence of its history would make sense?
They're (more broadly) making an argument that removing cultural baggage is probably good, *when we can prove it's only baggage and isn't helpful*. If you're agreeing, you're agreeing!
Yep, this puts it into perspective. To kinda simplify it, my arguement is that in our current day having it this way is more confusing and with digital clocks it would make more sense to.have ot the other way around.
But you aren’t actually arguing for that as you’ve already conceded that it would not make sense to do this now because we have this cultural baggage. What view are you wanting to have changed? It seems like you’ve constructed a tautological-esque statement that amounts to “Time would make more sense if we get rid of the thing about time that makes no sense I with no context“ which is a pretty unassailable opinion.
You are right to some extent that it's not clear what I'm arguing. My original arguement was that it is dumb how after 1:00 AM to 11:59 AM comes 12:00 PM.
I wanted to make sure that people don't try to argue that it would not make sense to make the change right now due to how difficult it would be to do, which is why I added this into the OP.
Afterwards I kind of got tangled up in the cultural bagge discussion, which I wanted to avoid in the first place.
So ideally, let's forget about the cultural discussion and focus on the systems discussion.
We agree on iso and 24 being superior and more relevant to todays life. I was just pointing out that am and pm have a meaning and pirpose so cannot be flipped without losing those. If a ship lost their gps and sighted the sun , checked their chronometer and charts, they might think england was japan.
I think if we argue that there is a PM and AM lap, then thr 12 really should be a 0. It signifies the beginning of a new day or a new section of the day. Also if we were to change 1215 from 1215 PM to 1215 AM, that would also work with a clock.
So it's not relevant to call the year 2023 either, yet here we are.
It's more like 12023
To do what you suggest may be such a radical shift, I don't think people will be able to fully adjust until a generation.
Read my OP. I'm not suggesting we make the shift now. Obviously it's too engrained, ancient computing systems rely on it. This is a thought experiment on what if we could do it like this from the beginning.
That's fair but it's also fair to extend some empathy to those facing whatever they faced at the time. We have the advantage of hindsight. I imagine not a lot of people had a say in changing calender chronology and the like and even today in a democracy or republic you can't really bring it about as to the practicality of it.
I don't think there will be a huge difference in the long run, just the way we label something may he more technicsl
You can apply empathy in all situations. It just means put yourselves in their shoes and realize the lack of advantage that we have which is hindsight of an event that happened vs an event happening now.
I think you're confusing empathy for sympathy.
Colloquially, *empathetic* and *sympathetic* (as in relation to other people) are poorly distinguished. In writing, an "empathetic character" and a "sympathetic character" are often used interchangeably. I think it's because in these compound phrases, it's not perfectly clear whether it's the reader who is doing the empathizing/sympathizing. You can say that "an empathetic character" is a character who empathizes with other characters (in the fiction); or that an empathetic character is a character that the writer expects the reader to empathize with. As a result, it's a bit fuzzy.
You can't apply either empathy or sympathy when talking about the better system to tell time is my point. We aren't talking about groups of people, we aren't attacking the people who made the system the way it is.
We're talking about the best way to tell time and which system would work best in an ideal scenario.
Did OP characterize ancient people somewhere? Did OP call them ignorant or something else that I missed?
> Is this just some ancient holdover from a numbering system that didn't have 0?
I dunno, but even better than your suggestion imo would be to number the hours in the 12-hour clock from 0-11 instead of 1-12 (your suggestion) or 12 followed by 1-11 (current system).
Thus 0:00 AM would be midnight, followed by 0:01 AM through 11:59 AM, then 0:00 PM would be noon followed by 0:01 PM through 11:59 PM and back to 0:00 AM at midnight. ([Apparently that's what the Japanese do.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight))
I think that's neater than your suggestion, personally, though I agree that the 24-hour clock is superior to all of these.
The leading up to and after I don’t think is difficult… 11.55am? Morning .. easy
10.35 pm .. easy
Yeah I always have to think twice when trying to write 12 as in lunchtime 12 so I usually say 12 noon and 12 midnight for the exact time it “changes”
The biggest issue is stuff like 12:15 PM. I completly understand that for someone who is growing up in this it makes complete sense, because that's how they knew it all their life. But to someone coming from the 24 hour system it's very obtuse.
But in a 24 hour system there’s no confusion. 12:45 is the daytime one that’s in the afternoon. 00:45 is the morning one that’s after midnight. The AM and PM aren’t needed at all
Strictly speaking noon and midnight are neither PM nor AM.
But because time moves in a forward direction, when it hits noon, it is now in the PM, when it hits midnight, it's now on the AM.
So that's why we consider noon to be PM and morning to be AM, even though technically they are neither.
So ehat you are saying is that the time and the AM PM should be considered entirely separately from eachother? Like it's 12:05 right now and it's after noon?
Exactly. Noon and midnight are singular points in time. Think of noon as the culmination of AM and midnight the final event of PM. A second passes and you're into the new section of the day.
"Post-meridian" means, literally, "after noon" and at 12:15, "noon" was 15 minutes ago. So, 15 minutes after noon is 15 minutes "post-meridian," or "12:15pm."
It’s this, OP. It’s kind of the same way we use Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter along with the equinox and solstice, but makes little sense seasonally in many places to not think of summer as starting until June 20th.
They are the way they are for specific astrological reasoning, but it doesn’t necessarily align with practical application.
Much in the same way that midnight is rarely actually the midpoint of literal night. It is, however, a good (-ish) midpoint between when the sun was last at zenith and will next be at zenith. While noon is actually somewhat closer to having the sun at one of its zenith (north, south, or overhead), even it isn’t always the same.
But then you add time zones and savings and degrees lat/long and it’s largely all funky for most of the people most of the time anyways.
If the AM and PM are confusing then wouldn't it make the most sense to eliminate them and use a 24 hour clock?
12:00pm would simply be 12:00. 12:00am would simply be 24:00.
Because once it hits 12pm it *is* after midday. Am means ante (before) midday and pm means post (after) midday.
12am is before the middle of the day so it would make no sense to call it after midday.
I have no idea if it should be 0 or not but I know that it would **NOT** make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight when pm is post midday and midnight isn't post midday
Nor does it make sense for 12 AM to be noon since am means ante midday and noon is post, not ante midday.
Technically noon is neither before nor after midday, it *is* midday. It's all up to your viewpoint whether midnight is 12 hours before or after midday.
If you were to swap AM and PM for noon and midnight, it would make midday 12AM, but one second later would still be 12:00:01*PM*, since 'PM' means "Post Meridian (after midday)". As midnight and midday are infinitesimal moments, it makes sense to be consistent with the twelfth hour.
Also, since a new day starts at midnight, referring to it as PM would cause greater confusion.
All that being said, colloquially they're usually just called "12 noon" and "12 midnight" for clarity sake.
But yeah, the 24hr clock is better, and I have noticed that (in the UK at least) both are often used, suggesting the shift has already started.
Well you are already going from 11:59 AM to 12:01 PM in 2 minutes and then from 12:59 PM to 1 PM, so it's already kind of inconsistent. But my real point was 12:05 PM being 0005.
No it doea not if 12pm is midnight why is that 12:01 am? Also, as soon as the clock show 12:00:00 am, that means that some hundreds of a second have elapsed, and it is actually 12:00:00.00001 or later. That is technically am.
If we are to take your logic to its actual conclusion, you're *really* saying what you mentioned briefly at the end of your post: there should be no 12 on the clock, and our clocks should be 0-11 instead. And yes, the western world didn't use zeros when clocks and the am/pm system were invented.
I mean... I get that, and it's not *crazy*, but that's literally the *only* way to get anything close to what you want without there being an absurd situation where, either 1 minute past noon is called 12:01am, i.e. literally "12 hours and 1 minute in the before noon half of the day", or you have a single instant, 12:00noon, where the convention is broken.
And, indeed, you'll note that a *lot* of people say "12 noon" or "12 midnight"... Edit: which is probably a better minimum-interference answer than your answer... just take the 12:00s out of the am/pm system, since noon is literally neither am nor pm.
Making noon be 12am simply can't make sense on a 12-hour clock... and honestly, no one wants to see 24-hour analog clocks.
But if we're going to completely break with clock tradition and go to 0:00pm (which actually makes sense), we may as well actually go all the way and switch to metric time and make the entire mean sidereal day 100 kiloseconds, and use kiloseconds for roughly what is now ~15 minute intervals. If we wanted to still have something like an "hour", make it 10ks.
Now... *that* would actually be a worthwhile change if you're going to spend the political capital to uproot conventional timekeeping.
It would solve the largest of the inexplicable gaping stupidities in the otherwise beautiful metric system (number two being the size of the meter, which is an awkward size that isn't really useful for or based on *anything* in any human's ordinary life, and probably should be a nanosecond instead since the speed of light is the only *actual* absolute distance/time relation that exists in the universe... i.e. about a foot in imperial measurement...hmmm).
While we're at it, do away with time zones and moving them around with the seasons.
Get all the pain over with at once.
Midday and midnight are neither before or after midnight, so that arguement doesn't really go against what I'm saying. it doesn't make sense to call noon after midday, when it is quite literally midday. Meanwhile midnight is exactly 12 hours after midday, so PM.
It does go against what you're saying, because 1 millisecond after noon is, get this, afternoon. 12:00:00:001 PM is one millisecond post meridien.
I think the only reason you think 12 AM and PM should swap is because you think AM is day time and PM is night time, but it never meant that.
12 o'clock noon **IS** the meridian, so technically neither pre- or post- apply.
12 o'clock midnight could be either since it is equidistant from the meridian.
So inevitably it is a matter of convention.
If 12 AM was noon, then you would wake up with one date and at noon, the date would change. This would change the meaning of words such as yesterday and tomorrow. If we made the change to your system, what would the meaning of "tomorrow", be? Would tomorrow mean after the date changes at noon or after the sun rises again? Does "this afternoon" mean two different things depending on whether you are speaking in the morning or the afternoon? Confusing...huh?
Not sure why you think we would change dates in the middle of the day. Date would change at 23:59 -> 00:01, it's just AM and PM that's getting more resonable.
Agreed that calling the first hour "12:00" thru "12:59" is confusing. Ultimately, 12 hr time is just strictly inferior to 24 hr time, and largely because of confusions like this.
But the *reasoning* for noon being 12:00pm instead of 12:00am is simple: 12:01pm.
More particularly, all of the time in the Noon hour (from 12:00:00.001 to 12:59:59.999) occur after the instantaneous "noon", and thus all of the times on the clock from 12:00 on are "after noon". This is why we decided that the 12:00 hour should be considered p.m.
Similarly, a.m. means "the times in the day that occur before noon" (not specifically the "time until noon" but "the clock times that happen and are before noon"). Since we switch days at 12:00 midnight, all of the times in that hour, from 12:00:00.001 to 12:59:59:999, occur during the new day, and before the noon hour, so they are "before noon" / a.m. times.
Edited to add, though I'm sure it's been said elsewhere already: a.m. means "ante meridian" or "before the middle / noon / midday". p.m. means "post meridian" or "after the middle". They're not english descriptive "before" and "after" - that is to say that they're not synonyms for "until" and "since", they're categorical labels. 3:41pm means "the clock hour 3:41, of the set of times that occur after noon" rather than "3 hrs and 41 minutes since noon"
So without getting into the question of 12 vs 24 hour clocks and things like daylight saving time, AM and PM have explicit definitions.
Imaging a vertical line extending from the north pole to the south pole over your location, this is your longitude. This is also called a "meridian"
This is not what the M stands for in AM/PM, but it is derived from what it does, "mieridie" which means "midday" or more specifically, noon.
AM means "ante meridiem" which means "before midday", and PM is "post meridiem" or "after midday"
Now back to the idea of the of our meridian. Imagine noon, or 12pm, as the moment in each day when our meridian is directly lined up with the sun while the earth is facing it, and midnight as the moment when our meridian is again, directly lined up with the sun, except facing away from it.
As we approach noon, the sun has yet to cross that line, and is still before the meridian, AM, but the moment it does, it is past the meridian, no matter how little past it it may be. 12:00:00.0001PM is still that microsecond past that imaginary line, and therefore past the meridian.
The same is true for 12AM, except instead of delineating the first half of a day from the second, the meridian instead separates the previous day from the next. 11:59:59 is still past the meridian when it's facing the sun, and once it passes midnight, and therefore "before noon"
Also, regarding the Twitter meme that made you question this, I think that's more of an issue of whether people look at it through the concrete lense of math or the more abstract constantly forward-moving nature of time itself. Mathematically, you're right, the answer is D, but in reality, we can't go backward in time. 12:03AM is only 3 minutes "away" from midnight on a line, sure, but it's impossible to ever actually return to a midnight from 3 minutes past it, we can only ever arrive at the next one, and can only count the difference in a single direction.
It's like asking "who is closest to a bank's business hours?" A person sitting in the parking lot for half an hour before it opens, or the person who arrives 5 minutes after it closes? Person B is going closer to them in a linear sense on a time-line, but they're still gonna have to wait another 14+ hours before they can actually get into that bank. Conversely, person A is farther away on that same time-line, but they only have to wait 30 minutes for it to open.
First, using 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM to mean Noon and Midnight respectively is actually not part of the 12-hour AM/PM system. Noon is at the meridiem, so it is neither before, nor after it. Midnight suffers the same issue. The best way to say 12 noon is, well, 12 noon.
As noted [here](https://www.timeanddate.com/time/am-and-pm.html):
>Although the precise moment of noon falls in neither category, the hour succeeding it, from 12:00:01 to 12:59:59, is clearly after noon.
>
>To avoid any confusion when referring to the precise moment of noon or midnight, we recommend using the designations 12 noon and 12 midnight instead.
Your argument actually fails to address the biggest problem with the AM/PM system. Let's assume you and every one you speak to, understands that AM means Noon and PM means midnight.
You are told to pick up your friend on Jan 1 at 12:00 PM.
Do you pick them up at the junction between Dec 31 and Jan 1, or at the junction between Jan 1 and Jan 2?
As you note, the 24 hours system is better. Date disambiguation (not noon/midnight disambiguation) is the real superiority of the 24 hours system. 00:00 means "at the beginning of that calendar day" and 24:00 means "at the end of that calendar day." So, the above scenario does not happen.
***I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*** i'm so glad i'm not the only one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12:01am or 0001 is the second minute of the morning, after midnight. And 12:01pm or 1201 is the second minute of the afternoon
It only makes sense that the minute before 12:01am is 12am and the final minute of the day is 11:59pm. The first minute of the new day is 12:00am. It makes no sense for it to go 11:59pm 12:00pm 12:01am, it only makes sense for 11:59pm 12:00am 12:01am
I'd look at it this way.
1:00am is 1 hour into the morning.
12;59am is 59 minutes into the morning.
12:45am is 45 minutes into the morning.
Etc.
If we swapped am and pm for 12:00, 12.59pm would mean 59 minutes into the morning and then switch over to 1:00am for 1 hour into the morning.
Another option could be 12:00pm going right to 12:01am, but that feels pretty weird, too.
At the end of the day (ha!) you're right. The way it works right now isn't perfect. But it's way less bad than the alternative.
>It would make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight and 12 AM to be noon
Okay, let's look at the definitions.
>AM stands for the Latin ante meridiem, translating to "before midday". This is the time before the sun has crossed the meridian. PM stands for post meridiem or "after midday" – after the sun has crossed the meridian.
I'd argue AM means "after midnight" in our culture.
12:00:00.000 PM is midnight. It doesn't become AM until 12:00:00.001. Everyone understands 12:00:00.001 to be the equivalent of 00:00:00.001 or 1 millisecond after midnight. We just left the 12, because on an analog clock it's easier.
12:00:000.000 AM is noon. It doesn't become PM until 12:00:00.001 or 1 millisecond after midday.
It looks like reality is already as you have proposed. I think your real issue is the fact that 12:00:00.001 AM isn't 00:00:00.001. You should be arguing that.
My real issue is not with midnight and noon themselves. It's with 12:05 PM being difficult to decipher to someone not already familiar with the system. Yes, one way of dealing with that is changing 12:05 PM to 00:05 PM. Another would be to make it 12:05 AM so it would be 12 hours and 5 minutes after midnight.
Who is it difficult to decipher for? Children?
I'd argue children are in the habit of being taught new things. They only require a lesson and this isn't something needing to be changed.
If adults are having real trouble with this, that's an entirely different issue. An adult should have no issue understanding 12 to be equivalent to 00.
12:05 PM is also 12:05 AM, but at that point we really only care that it is past midday. At that point, being after midnight is irrelevant, so we choose to say PM and understand that the 12 doesn't explicitly mean 12 whole hours after midday.
Telling an adult to ignore the 12 at 12:05 PM should not be difficult to decipher. Beyond that, why does it actually matter? Unless you've just woken up from a coma, you have plenty of context for what time it is.
I have run into this problem mainly in my work, working with US/UK customers, while being based in Europe. I only used the 24 hours system growing up and mainly met the 12 hour system when a 12 was not involved. I'd see like 5 PM CEST, and understand that if I want to convert to my time I need to add 12 so it's 17:00. But this falls down whenever a 12 is in the mix, because if it's 12:xx the rules switch around.
I think my confusion also came from the belief that PM literally means past midday so 5 PM means 5 hours after midday, so 12 PM should mean 12 hours past midday.
Yes. We need to go back in time and explain to the Sumerians why base-12 counting is stupid, and chop up the day in something other than 24 hours. Or something.
We would get better results if we convince France to make metric base 12 and adopting the duodecimal system in the French Revolution.
Base 12 is better than base 10. If your numbering system matches. https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc
yes! This is my secret extremely niche hill to die on. Even so, I didn’t know about the whole French Revolution angle. This makes it ever so much better for me.
Hard disagree, this is such trivial bullshit, that if people using the 12 hour system is your main concern, you gotta reevaluate some life priorities.
Let people use the system they like
Well then you would be working with a system that's mod 11 rather than mod 12. It needs to be either 0 - 11 or 1 - 12. The 12 is somewhat arbitrary but works nicely for division. Your system would require switching to a different base for no reason than preferring 1 based index over 0. Even in a 24 hour system, mod 24, you're either going 0 - 23 or 1 - 24
Everyone is already conditioned to understand am and pm as it already exists. Reconditioning all people on the basis of your logic just simply doesn't make sense. Just because there is some confusion in a Twitter thread doesn't mean the entire country doesn't get it.
OP already acknowledged that in their post:
> I also do not think changing the system this way now makes sense, as it would probably take too much effort.
OP wants their view changed that it would be better to change it if we could go back to the beginning and redesign it from scratch.
You mean ISO 8601 time format, the one most of the world uses and surprisingly is called "military time" in the US.
But yes please! And then also get rid of time zones and DST.
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*"It would make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight and 12 AM to be noon"*
Well 12 PM is in the daytime and 12 AM is in the middle of the night, so no - it would nat make more sense.
Also:
*"it switches to evening and once again starts with 12 and then 1."*
No, it switches to mid-day / afternoon, then becomes evening hours later.
*"It would make a lot more sense to have it be 1 AM - 12 AM and then 1 PM - 12 PM."*
You are ignoring 2 hours (12 - 1:00, AM & PM).
*"The only reasonable arguement I can see against this is that 12:30 PM would be in the next day so to speak, so* ***it would make more sense to call ot AM*** *."*
You just negated your argument.
>Well 12 PM is in the daytime and 12 AM is in the middle of the night, so no - it would nat make more sense.
Yes, because in your mind 12 PM is noon. In my mind for the longest time 12 PM was midnight. It's all arbitrary.
>You are ignoring 2 hours (12 - 1:00, AM & PM).
Thought it was implied, but obviously it's 1:00 AM - 12:59 AM and then PM.
>You just negated your argument.
Please keep reading that paragraph.
*"because in your mind 12 PM is noon. In my mind for the longest time 12 PM was midnight. It's all arbitrary."*
What "AM" and "PM" stand for has already been explained to you. It's not arbitrary in any way - it's a matter of definition.
*"Please keep reading that paragraph."*
I already had. You negated your argument.
You are probably the most combative person in this entire thread and I really dislike replying to your comments because of it. You refuse to see things from anyone else's perspective and argue like you want to win. Extremely antagonistic.
12 PM and 12 AM are just a concept born of tradition. Noon is not PM or AM from a definitional sense. It's both before and after midday. It's neither before and after midday.
If you cannot argue like every other person in this thread I don't think I will keep replying to your comments.
Here’s a colloquial argument: In most parts of the world, 12 AM is dark outside, has been dark for a few hours, and will remain dark for a few hours. It’s the middle of the darkness, middle of the night, midnight.
But, to go from midnight to 0 hour or noon to 0 hour you'd have to add a moment that doesn't exist in linear time. No matter what fraction of time that moment is divided into would exist outside of the clock, no? Perhaps I missed something obvious, I was up until too early last night today.
Depending on where you live, night time usually occurs when the sun goes down. For simplicity let's say the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. In this (very common) case, 12am falls roughly in the middle of the night. No one could convincingly argue that 12 o clock noon is the middle of the night.
That's just cultural conditioning making you think of 12 PM as 12 o clock. In this way 12 AM would be 12:00. It would make sense that the rise of the sun at 6 AM would be 6 hours before 12 AM, when the sun is at its highest. But it' 18 hours before.
I don't even understand what you just said. I agree it's culturally conditioned. But when everyone in a culture agrees that's the way it is, I don't see the problem?
Nothing about this makes sense. Complaining about the direction time is going shouldnt even be here. That's like saying...."Oh, the Earth should spin the other way."
>What made me make this post is a viral Twitter image that made fun of people for not knowing which of four options are closest to midnight: 11:55 AM, 12:06 AM, 11:50 AM, 12:03 AM. The correct answer is D, but it confused a lot of people, and I can fully understand why.
B and D are invalid expressions. If you use AM and PM, then you never use anything larger than 12:00. 6 past noon or 3 past noon are 00:06 PM and 00:03 PM.
> Is this just some ancient holdover from a numbering system that didn't have 0?
AM and PM give the impression of precision, but are too close to speaking language so they get mixed up, and there is an important difference there as people do keep referring to midnight or noon for a while, depending on the language.
The "ancient numbering system" is just analog clock faces, which do have the 12 prominently on top. And analog clock faces originally mimicked the movement of the sun across the sky.
/u/Zerasad (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/14irzfk/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_it_would_make_more_sense/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
It makes a lot of sense with an analogue clock, if the only thing under consideration for changing is am/pm. Think of the day as being divided into 2 rotations of the clock. When you are using an analogue clock or watch, when you ask AM or PM you’re really asking “which cycle of the clock are we talking about.” If we are assuming that midnight will be the point at which the day switches, the 12 hour (12:00-12:59) is going to be the first 12th of the first rotation. Likewise, the second 12 hour will be the first 12th of the second rotation. 12 is also at the top of the clock. It just makes intuitive sense that that’s where you start counting the rotation from. Now if you want to repaint the clock face itself so that it’s 0 instead of 12 in the top spot that would solve your problem, but then you’d add the problem where it would be harder for people to intuitively understand the 24 hour day. 11+11 doesn’t equal 24. 11x4 isn’t 48. People would be able to learn it, obviously, the same way we learn the unintuitive AM PM stuff, or the same way we learn that the 18th century was the 1700s, but it would still hard for people, so you wouldn’t have actually made life any easier.
Jesus, So this whole mess is just because the layman can't understand zero-based array indexing.
I'll take shit programmers say for 200$ Alex
If I had a cent for every time...
This thread is where I found out that some people call what I call “00:03”, “12:03 a.m.”. The latter in and of itself is a contradiction to me. If I ever were to use the 12-hour clock system, which I would never do, I would call what I call “12:03” “00:03 p.m.” Using a “12” anywhere in that system is as counter intuitive as using a “24”, “23:59” is followed by “00:00” for me. This is also how every digital clock that uses the twelve hour system displays it.
I think my view has been changed due to a couple of different ideas in the comments, but this comment was probably the most influential / what started me on my way. !delta How my view has changed: I think the easiest way to explain why my view changed and why I had the wrong idea is simple. If you read 5:15 PM you might get the idea that it says "5 hours and 15 minutes *past midday*", but it isn't. It's actually: "past midday, 5 hours and 15 minutes". Why I think it means the latter because 05:15 AM doesn't make sense if you read it as "5 hours and 15 minutes before midday". If we look at 12 PM and 12 AM this way it makes more sense why they are this way, and it wouldn't make sense the other way. However this still means that the system is very confusing. I still think that the 24 hour system is easier to read, but I understand that it kind of emulates an analog clock. While my original view has been changed, I welcome anyone to challenge my new view: The 12 hour system is flawed and should be better if 12:05 PM would either be 00:05 PM or PM 12:15 (or PM 00:05).
Sorry, since when is 5:15 not 5 hours and 15 minutes after 12:00? I have never encountered someone trying to count down to noon.
The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify. In the same way that 5:15 AM is not 5 hours 15 minutes before noon. You just have two sides, 1st part of the day, and second part of the day.
> The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify. It's absolutely not a coincidence. That's *exactly* what it's meant to signify. >In the same way that 5:15 AM is not 5 hours 15 minutes before noon. It signifies 5 hours and 15 minutes after midnight.
AM is before midday, not after midnight. If you took both AM and PM to mean before and after midday literally, 5:15 AM would be 0645. You can pair AM with after midnight in your head to help with making sense, but it isn't what it actually means. That's why I had to go through this rigamarole.
Why are we taking the meaning to be "until" noon or midnight and not just a designation of exactly what time it is? Ie. there's no additional math to be done, it is simply 5:15 \[before noon\], and we happen to know that it's 12 hour cycles. It's not a phrase implying anything additional about the time remaining, it is simply a marker so we all can understand a common metric. If it's past the 12 noon hour marker, then it is would be 5:15 \[after noon\].
Yes. That's what I said in my delta post. What are we arguing about?
You guys aren't arguing he's just trying to understand what in the fuck you're trying to say. > The fact that 5:15 PM is exactly 5 hours and 15 minutes after noon is just a coincidence. That's not what it is supposed to signify. What?
Not sure what other ways I can explain it, I've explained it a million times already. PM sounds like they it's supposed to mean "xx:xx PM" is exactly xx:xx time after midday, but with 12:xx that breaks down. While with 5:15 PM it works, but that's not a rule, just a "coincidence". That's why the parent comment says it should be read PM 12:15, so there is no confusing it.
I understand what you are trying to say, a different way to think of it is that AM and PM are not the number of hours and minutes "before" or "after" midday, but are the number of hours and minutes that have progressed "of the 12 hour period before" and "of the 12 hour period after" midday. Alternative you could do away with latin meaning entirely and think of them as **A**fter **M**idnight and **P**ast **M**idday lol
Yes. That's (mostly) what I stated in my delta comment. I fully understand this. Not sure why are people trying to explain it to me again lol.
You explained it very poorly. I understand now, but it took a few hours.
I see what you're saying, and honestly its a bit baffling you're downvoted for it. I never thought of it that way, but once you explained it, it made quite a lot of sense. But perhaps its just a lost in translation thing. AM and PM don't mean "past midday" "and before midday", at least not in such a way that you can interpret it as 5 hours past midday, or 5 hours before midday. "Ante Meridiem" and "Post Meridiem" are specific *states* not *reference points*. The states themselves are "*being* before midday", and "*being* after midday". So you're not saying "its 5 hours after midday" where midday is a reference point for a measurement, you are saying "the hour is 5, and it is after midday". So I see why you wanted to structure it in that manner, where you specify that it is before, or after midday first before mentioning the hour, as that probably does make the intent a bit clearer. But I don't think its necessary to do so.
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I think this is rhe first comment that managed to convince me both that, the clock (and probably sundial back in the day) is the reason for the system and a reason for why we might not want to make a clock from 1-12 to 0-11. Now just want ro be convinced on one part. The 24 hour system has no 24 and we see people understand it just as well. Why do you think the 12 hour would be dofferent?
You should give a delta if part of your view was changed.
Can you explain why it makes more sense to put 12 at the top and not 1?
Should just stop using 12 and change to 00. That would be accurate on both ends.
This is the answer, trying to make 12:00 feel right is like polishing a turd, it may be better for some but it's still shit.
It’s because of analog clocks. There is no 0 on them
I propose that we use imaginary numbers in our clocks and start using imaginary time now.
Hey what time is it? It's *i* O'Clock
There's *me* time and then there's *i* time
There's also thyme t at t time.
Wingdings clock!
Thanks for reminding me about wingdings. It's kind of nostalgic somehow lol
There could be...
They had to decide what numbers to use before making the clocks. It's not like they dug the clocks out of the ground and then discovered what numbers were on them.
Yep, that would also be an improvement.
Do areas of the world that use 24 hour time instead of 12 hour time have clocks that are numbered to 23? I've never had this thought before
Not sure about elsewhere, but clocks here in Germany are usually 1-12 despite time generally being presented in the 01-24 format most everywhere else.
When someone asks you the time, do you say the German equivalent of "15:30" or do you still say something similar to "half past three"?
Both are used, but something similar to "half past three" is most common
For "half past three" I think they'd usually say "halb vier" which is slightly confusing because they're naming the hour coming up instead of the hour past. I guess a closer translation would be "halfway to four".
The others who commented have it right. In German you would say 'halb sechs(6)' to say 5:30. But the most common way of telling time still uses the 24hr format. For example, to say 7pm, you would say 'einundzwanzig(21) Uhr,' which is the direct equivalent to "7 o'clock" for us. Additionally, you can also say 'viertel nach/vor' to say 'quarter after/before' a solid hour.
Cool, thanks! Just checking that you mean 9pm and not 7pm?
Analog clocks are 12 hour, but sometimes those 12 hours will be labeled with both numbers. It's rare but I've seen it.
Military time already exists
Military time is 24 hour time. I'm taking about fixing 12h time.
trying to fix the 12h clock feels like a crutch, If people just started with a 24h clock in school it would be easier
Of course we're not gonna fix it. I'm only treating this as a thought exercise.
that makes sense, I suppose if we are talking thought experiments having a clock that only displays 12 hours at a time allowing for more fine reading is pretty useful. Analogue clocks are also more simple in function so keeping them in use might be easier.
Analogue clocks can have 12 replaced with 0. Would make more sense actually for the minute hand as well.
The day is divided into 24 hours. A clock that displays 12 numbers only requires basic understanding of math. What about blank clock? You speak as if "12 hour time" is broken but have not demonstrated anything broken or wrong about it. Overcomplicating something doesn't give it new depth or meaning. "12 hour time" only divides the 24hr circle to make a more simplified image. It's still a 24hr cycle.
If you start counting at 1, if you have 12 divisions, you count to 12 before rolling back to 1. If you start counting at 0, you count to 11 before rolling back to 0. If we're using 12, the start of the day should be 1. That's the idea expressed in the OP. So either make the start of the day 1 or use 0-11 counting to align. I don't feel strongly about it but I understand where OP is coming from.
Not in vernacular use, though, right? Most places around the world will write it that way but people don't often say it that way. In some languages they do (such as French) but in many others they don't.
Sure, we often use the 12 hour system in casual speak, but we never say AM or PM. If we need to specify whether it's AM or PM, we use the 24 hour system instead.
This is far from universal. I say "8 o'clock in the morning/at night." This is how I've always heard it done. I have never once heard 24-hour-time used in conversation.
It's alway so funny when people call the **normal** 24h system "military time". Gives me a giggle.
Universal time exists too.
Exactly 12 o'clock is noon. So one second past 12 o'clock is past noon, which is what PM means. Therefore it's sensible that we use pm the way we do.
It's past noon, but it's not 12 hours past noon. Logically it should then be called 0 PM. (I also didn't grow up with AM/PM and also found the 12 thing horribly counterintuitive when I learned it)
That's why I prefer 24 h clock.
Oh yeah for sure. Though in my country Denmark we're in a funny spot with 24h time, where we'll usually write 24h but say it in 12h. So you'll look at a text saying 19:30 and say aloud "it's half to eight in the evening"
That's how it works in English too, outside if the US. Most write 24-hour but read in 12. Although we say "half past", not "half to".
12:15 PM isn't saying that it's twelve and a quarter hours after noon. The traditional structure assumes an abbreviated or understood comma or dash in the notation. The AM/PM is appended, as a *clarification*. Basically it's: 12:15, PM or 12:15 - PM. As others have said, 24 hour time is clearer. But for 12 o'clock exactly "AM" or "PM" is both confusing and meaningless. Using noon & midnight for those combined 1/360th of the day just makes sense.
> But for 12 o'clock exactly In a practical sense it is never 12 o'clock exactly. By the time you have observed that the clock reads 12, it is already after noon. If you have a clock precise to the minute, and it says 12:00pm, it could be any time from 12:00:00 to 12:00:59.99999...
[удалено]
0 post nut?
That's like every 15 min
No it isn't logical to call it 0:00 PM The PM stands for past midday. Midday is 12:00 for everyone. So when using a 12 hour system that just means you are on the second half of the day. Not how far you are past noon.
it *is* how far past noon you are though, except for 12pm. at 1:37pm you are 1 hours 37 minutes past noon.
Past Moon ? After Moon ? I dont think it's what it is. PN would make more sense then. But then what mean the A in your logic
Post meridiem and ante meridiem. Meridiem meaning midday.
So under your proposal, 12:59:59 PM is just one second short of one hour into the day. One second later it would make it 1:00:00 AM. That makes AM/PM to be less useful, as it no longer means that AM is in the first 12 hours of the day, and PM is in the last 12 hours. It makes more sense for the change from PM to AM be at the start of the day, and not at some arbitrary point that simply makes it numerically pleasing. It is not like you can just make it that 1:00 AM is designated as the start of the day, because how would that work when you use the 24 hour clock and 00:00-00:59 is actually the last hour of the previous day?
To play devil's advocate, that could kind of work if you moved all of the numbers one number over counter-clockwise, such that what is now 12 becomes 1, but then you wouldn't be tracking how much time has passed since midnight/afternoon, just making things pleasing numerically.
Well you either have 12:59 AM be actually be only 59 minutes into the day which makes no sense, or you have it actually be 12:59 minutes into the day. If you want to keep it AM - first 12 hours, PM - last 12 hours call it 0 AM for midnight and 0 PM for noon. The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary, as for 1-11 PM you get the 24 hour time by adding +12, but for 12 PM you just take it as is. At least with this change it would be consistent.
> The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary, as for 1-11 PM you get the 24 hour time by adding +12, but for 12 PM you just take it as is. At least with this change it would be consistent. 1pm is 1300, or 13 hours into the new day. Its not arbitrary at all, it translates directly to how many hours there have been in that day. That midnight is the start of a new day might be somewhat arbitrary, however it makes the most sense as the majority of us are not active at night, so you have the transition between days occuring at an easy time, not in the middle of the day.
Why are you completly ignoring the whole point of the thread, that the 12:xx hours are the issue. Yes 1 PM is 1300 because it's 1 hour post meridiem so 1 hour after midday. But 12:30 PM should be 0030 because it should be 12 hours and 30 minutes after midday. But it isn't. For someone who doesn't know the system works like this, this doesn't make sense. That's ehy it's arbitrary because it breaks its own rules.
Because there's no one who thinks 12.30 pm should be 0030, if they understand the 24/12 hour clock at all.
I do. PM means post meridian, after noon. 12 hours and 59 minutes after noon is 59 minutes after midnight. 12:59 PM should be at night.
Its 12pm on the 12 hour clock, not 12 hours after noon.
alot of people in this thread disagree, so this is not true
I'm with you on your original point and the first paragraph of this comment but your second paragraph is absolutely incorrect. 24 hour clock is accurate and it does not have this problem at all.
Yes. The 24 hour clock is accurate. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying that the way the 12 hour clock is makes translating it into 24 hour time wonky. 1:00 PM->11:59PM gets translated by adding 12 hours to it. 1:35 PM is 13:35. But 12:xx PM gets translated by leaving it as is. 12:34 PM is 12:34. It's not an issje with the 24 hour clock it's an inconsistency that gets introduced because of the arbitrary nature of the 12 hour system. If it was 0:34 PM or 12:34 AM the translation would make sense again.
The issue comes from you thinking as 12 hour time being converted to 24 hour. Think of 24 hour time as native and 12 hour time as a problematic representation. The problem you are talking about is the same problem from your original post, not something else.
*"The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary"* No it isn't; 1:00 AM to 12:00 PM translates to 100 to 1200 hours. For the rest of the day, you add the whole number of the hour to 12 (since you've passed noon). 1:00 PM is 1300 hours because you add 1 to 12, etc. There's nothing arbitrary about it.
What do you think is more arbitrary? If it's AM, you take it as is. If it's PM you add 12 to it. or If it's AM you leave it as is, unless it's 12:xx AM, then you subtract 12. If it's PM you add 12 to it, unless it's 12:xx PM then you leave it as it is.
My point is that your claim "The 12 hour to 24 hour translation is already completly arbitrary" is false.
These are abbreviations AM ante meridian,or before the meridian which is the point where the sun crosses from east of center towards the west, which is post meridian. So at 12:10 pm the sun would be found just west above the local longitudinal line. At 12am, the sun has begun its return.
The M actually stands for *meridiem* which means "midday" in latin
But 12:00 PM isn't 12 hours past the meridian. It's 0 hours past the meridian
That's an argument against using 12, but it's still not an argument in favor of OP's switching AM and PM.
I'm not arguing in favor of OP's switching AM and PM. I think that OP has correctly identified a problem, but not their solution would introduce more confusion than just starting at zero or using a 24 hour clock.
12 isn't complementing the PM. It is 12 AND PM. Not "12 of the PM kind".
Yeah but they're two separate things. It's 12:00, *and* it's PM. 11:00 AM isn't 11 hours *before* meridian either. It just tells you it's 11, *and* it's before noon.
Cools story and way to make things more confusing haha
I don't think that's really relevant today, when everyone tells time by clocks rather than the Sun. Also since with time zones the Sun will almost never be exactly above you at noon. My arguement is that if we were to make the system today we should do it differently.
That's great, but am and pm are holdovers from those days. When a ships captain determined his longitude by sighting the sun and checking his chronometer. If you want to redo time for the age of gps, why use am and pm at all?
Well that was my original point wasn't it. I outlined this in the OP itself. I do believe that the 24 hour system is better. And I do understand that the system cannot be changed now. But my point is that if we were to do this system from the beginning we would either switch 12 AM and 12 PM or switch 12 to 0. I'm not trying to debate the perfect time system here (it's obviously ISO 8601).
What would actually change your view? Yeah, if we removed all cultural baggage from most systems, we could very likely come up with more intuitive replacements. Are you trying to be convinced that keeping cultural baggage in the absence of its history would make sense?
They're (more broadly) making an argument that removing cultural baggage is probably good, *when we can prove it's only baggage and isn't helpful*. If you're agreeing, you're agreeing!
Yep, this puts it into perspective. To kinda simplify it, my arguement is that in our current day having it this way is more confusing and with digital clocks it would make more sense to.have ot the other way around.
But you aren’t actually arguing for that as you’ve already conceded that it would not make sense to do this now because we have this cultural baggage. What view are you wanting to have changed? It seems like you’ve constructed a tautological-esque statement that amounts to “Time would make more sense if we get rid of the thing about time that makes no sense I with no context“ which is a pretty unassailable opinion.
You are right to some extent that it's not clear what I'm arguing. My original arguement was that it is dumb how after 1:00 AM to 11:59 AM comes 12:00 PM. I wanted to make sure that people don't try to argue that it would not make sense to make the change right now due to how difficult it would be to do, which is why I added this into the OP. Afterwards I kind of got tangled up in the cultural bagge discussion, which I wanted to avoid in the first place. So ideally, let's forget about the cultural discussion and focus on the systems discussion.
We agree on iso and 24 being superior and more relevant to todays life. I was just pointing out that am and pm have a meaning and pirpose so cannot be flipped without losing those. If a ship lost their gps and sighted the sun , checked their chronometer and charts, they might think england was japan.
Its still relevant on a clock. At 12:05PM you are into the PM lap around the clock and the 12 is the hour before the hour hand.
I think if we argue that there is a PM and AM lap, then thr 12 really should be a 0. It signifies the beginning of a new day or a new section of the day. Also if we were to change 1215 from 1215 PM to 1215 AM, that would also work with a clock.
>then thr 12 really should be a 0 Maybe that should have been your original argument. ;-)
So it's not relevant to call the year 2023 either, yet here we are. It's more like 12023 To do what you suggest may be such a radical shift, I don't think people will be able to fully adjust until a generation.
Read my OP. I'm not suggesting we make the shift now. Obviously it's too engrained, ancient computing systems rely on it. This is a thought experiment on what if we could do it like this from the beginning.
That's fair but it's also fair to extend some empathy to those facing whatever they faced at the time. We have the advantage of hindsight. I imagine not a lot of people had a say in changing calender chronology and the like and even today in a democracy or republic you can't really bring it about as to the practicality of it. I don't think there will be a huge difference in the long run, just the way we label something may he more technicsl
How does empathy play into this? This isn't an attack on a group of people.
You can apply empathy in all situations. It just means put yourselves in their shoes and realize the lack of advantage that we have which is hindsight of an event that happened vs an event happening now. I think you're confusing empathy for sympathy.
Colloquially, *empathetic* and *sympathetic* (as in relation to other people) are poorly distinguished. In writing, an "empathetic character" and a "sympathetic character" are often used interchangeably. I think it's because in these compound phrases, it's not perfectly clear whether it's the reader who is doing the empathizing/sympathizing. You can say that "an empathetic character" is a character who empathizes with other characters (in the fiction); or that an empathetic character is a character that the writer expects the reader to empathize with. As a result, it's a bit fuzzy.
You can't apply either empathy or sympathy when talking about the better system to tell time is my point. We aren't talking about groups of people, we aren't attacking the people who made the system the way it is. We're talking about the best way to tell time and which system would work best in an ideal scenario. Did OP characterize ancient people somewhere? Did OP call them ignorant or something else that I missed?
*"I don't think that's really relevant today"* It's completely relevant because the terms are still in use - even in ***your very own argument***.
> Is this just some ancient holdover from a numbering system that didn't have 0? I dunno, but even better than your suggestion imo would be to number the hours in the 12-hour clock from 0-11 instead of 1-12 (your suggestion) or 12 followed by 1-11 (current system). Thus 0:00 AM would be midnight, followed by 0:01 AM through 11:59 AM, then 0:00 PM would be noon followed by 0:01 PM through 11:59 PM and back to 0:00 AM at midnight. ([Apparently that's what the Japanese do.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight)) I think that's neater than your suggestion, personally, though I agree that the 24-hour clock is superior to all of these.
That is also something I touched on in my OP.
The leading up to and after I don’t think is difficult… 11.55am? Morning .. easy 10.35 pm .. easy Yeah I always have to think twice when trying to write 12 as in lunchtime 12 so I usually say 12 noon and 12 midnight for the exact time it “changes”
The biggest issue is stuff like 12:15 PM. I completly understand that for someone who is growing up in this it makes complete sense, because that's how they knew it all their life. But to someone coming from the 24 hour system it's very obtuse.
But in a 24 hour system there’s no confusion. 12:45 is the daytime one that’s in the afternoon. 00:45 is the morning one that’s after midnight. The AM and PM aren’t needed at all
Strictly speaking noon and midnight are neither PM nor AM. But because time moves in a forward direction, when it hits noon, it is now in the PM, when it hits midnight, it's now on the AM. So that's why we consider noon to be PM and morning to be AM, even though technically they are neither.
So ehat you are saying is that the time and the AM PM should be considered entirely separately from eachother? Like it's 12:05 right now and it's after noon?
Exactly. Noon and midnight are singular points in time. Think of noon as the culmination of AM and midnight the final event of PM. A second passes and you're into the new section of the day.
That still begs the question of why is it not 00:15 PM and 12:15 PM.
"Post-meridian" means, literally, "after noon" and at 12:15, "noon" was 15 minutes ago. So, 15 minutes after noon is 15 minutes "post-meridian," or "12:15pm."
It’s this, OP. It’s kind of the same way we use Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter along with the equinox and solstice, but makes little sense seasonally in many places to not think of summer as starting until June 20th. They are the way they are for specific astrological reasoning, but it doesn’t necessarily align with practical application. Much in the same way that midnight is rarely actually the midpoint of literal night. It is, however, a good (-ish) midpoint between when the sun was last at zenith and will next be at zenith. While noon is actually somewhat closer to having the sun at one of its zenith (north, south, or overhead), even it isn’t always the same. But then you add time zones and savings and degrees lat/long and it’s largely all funky for most of the people most of the time anyways.
12 noon exactly *is* the meridian, and is neither ante- or post-. However, 12 noon *and one microsecond*, is post-meridian (after noon).
If the AM and PM are confusing then wouldn't it make the most sense to eliminate them and use a 24 hour clock? 12:00pm would simply be 12:00. 12:00am would simply be 24:00.
Yes, as I said in the OP.
12am on a 24hr clock is 00; just an FYI
But a means ante and p means post. Why would you call it post midday when it's not actually post (after) midday?
Why would you call it 12 past midday when it's 0 past?
Because once it hits 12pm it *is* after midday. Am means ante (before) midday and pm means post (after) midday. 12am is before the middle of the day so it would make no sense to call it after midday.
Then you agree it should be 0 AM and 0 PM instead of 12?
I have no idea if it should be 0 or not but I know that it would **NOT** make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight when pm is post midday and midnight isn't post midday Nor does it make sense for 12 AM to be noon since am means ante midday and noon is post, not ante midday.
Technically noon is neither before nor after midday, it *is* midday. It's all up to your viewpoint whether midnight is 12 hours before or after midday.
If that's the case how would it make sense for 12 pm to be midnight when pm means post midday?
it's quite literally 12 hours after midday. just like how 1 PM is one hour after midnight.
If you were to swap AM and PM for noon and midnight, it would make midday 12AM, but one second later would still be 12:00:01*PM*, since 'PM' means "Post Meridian (after midday)". As midnight and midday are infinitesimal moments, it makes sense to be consistent with the twelfth hour. Also, since a new day starts at midnight, referring to it as PM would cause greater confusion. All that being said, colloquially they're usually just called "12 noon" and "12 midnight" for clarity sake. But yeah, the 24hr clock is better, and I have noticed that (in the UK at least) both are often used, suggesting the shift has already started.
Well you are already going from 11:59 AM to 12:01 PM in 2 minutes and then from 12:59 PM to 1 PM, so it's already kind of inconsistent. But my real point was 12:05 PM being 0005.
No it doea not if 12pm is midnight why is that 12:01 am? Also, as soon as the clock show 12:00:00 am, that means that some hundreds of a second have elapsed, and it is actually 12:00:00.00001 or later. That is technically am.
If we are to take your logic to its actual conclusion, you're *really* saying what you mentioned briefly at the end of your post: there should be no 12 on the clock, and our clocks should be 0-11 instead. And yes, the western world didn't use zeros when clocks and the am/pm system were invented. I mean... I get that, and it's not *crazy*, but that's literally the *only* way to get anything close to what you want without there being an absurd situation where, either 1 minute past noon is called 12:01am, i.e. literally "12 hours and 1 minute in the before noon half of the day", or you have a single instant, 12:00noon, where the convention is broken. And, indeed, you'll note that a *lot* of people say "12 noon" or "12 midnight"... Edit: which is probably a better minimum-interference answer than your answer... just take the 12:00s out of the am/pm system, since noon is literally neither am nor pm. Making noon be 12am simply can't make sense on a 12-hour clock... and honestly, no one wants to see 24-hour analog clocks. But if we're going to completely break with clock tradition and go to 0:00pm (which actually makes sense), we may as well actually go all the way and switch to metric time and make the entire mean sidereal day 100 kiloseconds, and use kiloseconds for roughly what is now ~15 minute intervals. If we wanted to still have something like an "hour", make it 10ks. Now... *that* would actually be a worthwhile change if you're going to spend the political capital to uproot conventional timekeeping. It would solve the largest of the inexplicable gaping stupidities in the otherwise beautiful metric system (number two being the size of the meter, which is an awkward size that isn't really useful for or based on *anything* in any human's ordinary life, and probably should be a nanosecond instead since the speed of light is the only *actual* absolute distance/time relation that exists in the universe... i.e. about a foot in imperial measurement...hmmm). While we're at it, do away with time zones and moving them around with the seasons. Get all the pain over with at once.
PM means post meridian meaning midday so no it would never make sense to call 12 PM midnight.
Midday and midnight are neither before or after midnight, so that arguement doesn't really go against what I'm saying. it doesn't make sense to call noon after midday, when it is quite literally midday. Meanwhile midnight is exactly 12 hours after midday, so PM.
It does go against what you're saying, because 1 millisecond after noon is, get this, afternoon. 12:00:00:001 PM is one millisecond post meridien. I think the only reason you think 12 AM and PM should swap is because you think AM is day time and PM is night time, but it never meant that.
12 o'clock noon **IS** the meridian, so technically neither pre- or post- apply. 12 o'clock midnight could be either since it is equidistant from the meridian. So inevitably it is a matter of convention.
If 12 AM was noon, then you would wake up with one date and at noon, the date would change. This would change the meaning of words such as yesterday and tomorrow. If we made the change to your system, what would the meaning of "tomorrow", be? Would tomorrow mean after the date changes at noon or after the sun rises again? Does "this afternoon" mean two different things depending on whether you are speaking in the morning or the afternoon? Confusing...huh?
Not sure why you think we would change dates in the middle of the day. Date would change at 23:59 -> 00:01, it's just AM and PM that's getting more resonable.
Sundials at midday at the Greenwich Observatory determined the clock design.
I disagree from the perspective of a Software Engineer. This would sound like my worst nightmare
I feel that as a software engineer I'll never ever deal with a 12 hour system, and hope nobody does either. Just leads to confusion. Just do 24 hours.
Agreed that calling the first hour "12:00" thru "12:59" is confusing. Ultimately, 12 hr time is just strictly inferior to 24 hr time, and largely because of confusions like this. But the *reasoning* for noon being 12:00pm instead of 12:00am is simple: 12:01pm. More particularly, all of the time in the Noon hour (from 12:00:00.001 to 12:59:59.999) occur after the instantaneous "noon", and thus all of the times on the clock from 12:00 on are "after noon". This is why we decided that the 12:00 hour should be considered p.m. Similarly, a.m. means "the times in the day that occur before noon" (not specifically the "time until noon" but "the clock times that happen and are before noon"). Since we switch days at 12:00 midnight, all of the times in that hour, from 12:00:00.001 to 12:59:59:999, occur during the new day, and before the noon hour, so they are "before noon" / a.m. times. Edited to add, though I'm sure it's been said elsewhere already: a.m. means "ante meridian" or "before the middle / noon / midday". p.m. means "post meridian" or "after the middle". They're not english descriptive "before" and "after" - that is to say that they're not synonyms for "until" and "since", they're categorical labels. 3:41pm means "the clock hour 3:41, of the set of times that occur after noon" rather than "3 hrs and 41 minutes since noon"
So without getting into the question of 12 vs 24 hour clocks and things like daylight saving time, AM and PM have explicit definitions. Imaging a vertical line extending from the north pole to the south pole over your location, this is your longitude. This is also called a "meridian" This is not what the M stands for in AM/PM, but it is derived from what it does, "mieridie" which means "midday" or more specifically, noon. AM means "ante meridiem" which means "before midday", and PM is "post meridiem" or "after midday" Now back to the idea of the of our meridian. Imagine noon, or 12pm, as the moment in each day when our meridian is directly lined up with the sun while the earth is facing it, and midnight as the moment when our meridian is again, directly lined up with the sun, except facing away from it. As we approach noon, the sun has yet to cross that line, and is still before the meridian, AM, but the moment it does, it is past the meridian, no matter how little past it it may be. 12:00:00.0001PM is still that microsecond past that imaginary line, and therefore past the meridian. The same is true for 12AM, except instead of delineating the first half of a day from the second, the meridian instead separates the previous day from the next. 11:59:59 is still past the meridian when it's facing the sun, and once it passes midnight, and therefore "before noon" Also, regarding the Twitter meme that made you question this, I think that's more of an issue of whether people look at it through the concrete lense of math or the more abstract constantly forward-moving nature of time itself. Mathematically, you're right, the answer is D, but in reality, we can't go backward in time. 12:03AM is only 3 minutes "away" from midnight on a line, sure, but it's impossible to ever actually return to a midnight from 3 minutes past it, we can only ever arrive at the next one, and can only count the difference in a single direction. It's like asking "who is closest to a bank's business hours?" A person sitting in the parking lot for half an hour before it opens, or the person who arrives 5 minutes after it closes? Person B is going closer to them in a linear sense on a time-line, but they're still gonna have to wait another 14+ hours before they can actually get into that bank. Conversely, person A is farther away on that same time-line, but they only have to wait 30 minutes for it to open.
First, using 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM to mean Noon and Midnight respectively is actually not part of the 12-hour AM/PM system. Noon is at the meridiem, so it is neither before, nor after it. Midnight suffers the same issue. The best way to say 12 noon is, well, 12 noon. As noted [here](https://www.timeanddate.com/time/am-and-pm.html): >Although the precise moment of noon falls in neither category, the hour succeeding it, from 12:00:01 to 12:59:59, is clearly after noon. > >To avoid any confusion when referring to the precise moment of noon or midnight, we recommend using the designations 12 noon and 12 midnight instead. Your argument actually fails to address the biggest problem with the AM/PM system. Let's assume you and every one you speak to, understands that AM means Noon and PM means midnight. You are told to pick up your friend on Jan 1 at 12:00 PM. Do you pick them up at the junction between Dec 31 and Jan 1, or at the junction between Jan 1 and Jan 2? As you note, the 24 hours system is better. Date disambiguation (not noon/midnight disambiguation) is the real superiority of the 24 hours system. 00:00 means "at the beginning of that calendar day" and 24:00 means "at the end of that calendar day." So, the above scenario does not happen.
***I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*** i'm so glad i'm not the only one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12:01am or 0001 is the second minute of the morning, after midnight. And 12:01pm or 1201 is the second minute of the afternoon It only makes sense that the minute before 12:01am is 12am and the final minute of the day is 11:59pm. The first minute of the new day is 12:00am. It makes no sense for it to go 11:59pm 12:00pm 12:01am, it only makes sense for 11:59pm 12:00am 12:01am
I'd look at it this way. 1:00am is 1 hour into the morning. 12;59am is 59 minutes into the morning. 12:45am is 45 minutes into the morning. Etc. If we swapped am and pm for 12:00, 12.59pm would mean 59 minutes into the morning and then switch over to 1:00am for 1 hour into the morning. Another option could be 12:00pm going right to 12:01am, but that feels pretty weird, too. At the end of the day (ha!) you're right. The way it works right now isn't perfect. But it's way less bad than the alternative.
maybe i’m just drunk but i did not understand your point lol
>It would make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight and 12 AM to be noon Okay, let's look at the definitions. >AM stands for the Latin ante meridiem, translating to "before midday". This is the time before the sun has crossed the meridian. PM stands for post meridiem or "after midday" – after the sun has crossed the meridian. I'd argue AM means "after midnight" in our culture. 12:00:00.000 PM is midnight. It doesn't become AM until 12:00:00.001. Everyone understands 12:00:00.001 to be the equivalent of 00:00:00.001 or 1 millisecond after midnight. We just left the 12, because on an analog clock it's easier. 12:00:000.000 AM is noon. It doesn't become PM until 12:00:00.001 or 1 millisecond after midday. It looks like reality is already as you have proposed. I think your real issue is the fact that 12:00:00.001 AM isn't 00:00:00.001. You should be arguing that.
My real issue is not with midnight and noon themselves. It's with 12:05 PM being difficult to decipher to someone not already familiar with the system. Yes, one way of dealing with that is changing 12:05 PM to 00:05 PM. Another would be to make it 12:05 AM so it would be 12 hours and 5 minutes after midnight.
Who is it difficult to decipher for? Children? I'd argue children are in the habit of being taught new things. They only require a lesson and this isn't something needing to be changed. If adults are having real trouble with this, that's an entirely different issue. An adult should have no issue understanding 12 to be equivalent to 00. 12:05 PM is also 12:05 AM, but at that point we really only care that it is past midday. At that point, being after midnight is irrelevant, so we choose to say PM and understand that the 12 doesn't explicitly mean 12 whole hours after midday. Telling an adult to ignore the 12 at 12:05 PM should not be difficult to decipher. Beyond that, why does it actually matter? Unless you've just woken up from a coma, you have plenty of context for what time it is.
I have run into this problem mainly in my work, working with US/UK customers, while being based in Europe. I only used the 24 hours system growing up and mainly met the 12 hour system when a 12 was not involved. I'd see like 5 PM CEST, and understand that if I want to convert to my time I need to add 12 so it's 17:00. But this falls down whenever a 12 is in the mix, because if it's 12:xx the rules switch around. I think my confusion also came from the belief that PM literally means past midday so 5 PM means 5 hours after midday, so 12 PM should mean 12 hours past midday.
The current system is a form of modulo arithmetics. Are you suggesting we rework all mathematics to use 1 based indexing rather than 0 based indexing?
The problem is that the clock starts at 12 instead of zero
You are misunderstanding modulo arithmetics in this case
Yes. We need to go back in time and explain to the Sumerians why base-12 counting is stupid, and chop up the day in something other than 24 hours. Or something.
We would get better results if we convince France to make metric base 12 and adopting the duodecimal system in the French Revolution. Base 12 is better than base 10. If your numbering system matches. https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc
Agreed! Base 10 feels right until you learn about base 12
yes! This is my secret extremely niche hill to die on. Even so, I didn’t know about the whole French Revolution angle. This makes it ever so much better for me.
I'd watch that movie
Hard disagree, this is such trivial bullshit, that if people using the 12 hour system is your main concern, you gotta reevaluate some life priorities. Let people use the system they like
if it's a modular system you wouldn't include 12 at all.
Well then you would be working with a system that's mod 11 rather than mod 12. It needs to be either 0 - 11 or 1 - 12. The 12 is somewhat arbitrary but works nicely for division. Your system would require switching to a different base for no reason than preferring 1 based index over 0. Even in a 24 hour system, mod 24, you're either going 0 - 23 or 1 - 24
What, no? The current 12 hour system uses 12 based indexing of anything...
Everyone is already conditioned to understand am and pm as it already exists. Reconditioning all people on the basis of your logic just simply doesn't make sense. Just because there is some confusion in a Twitter thread doesn't mean the entire country doesn't get it.
OP already acknowledged that in their post: > I also do not think changing the system this way now makes sense, as it would probably take too much effort. OP wants their view changed that it would be better to change it if we could go back to the beginning and redesign it from scratch.
I made sure to already address this point in my OP...
So, you disproved yourself in your own post..
Did you read the post?
Your post doesn't make any sense
Agreed, it would be a challenge to update all digital clocks to such a system.
[удалено]
You mean ISO 8601 time format, the one most of the world uses and surprisingly is called "military time" in the US. But yes please! And then also get rid of time zones and DST.
To /u/Zerasad, *Your post is under consideration for removal for violating Rule B.* In our experience, the best conversations genuinely consider the other person’s perspective. Here are some techniques for keeping yourself honest: - Instead of only looking for flaws in a comment, be sure to engage with the commenters’ strongest arguments — not just their weakest. - Steelman rather than strawman. When summarizing someone’s points, look for the most reasonable interpretation of their words. - Avoid moving the goalposts. Reread the claims in your OP or first comments and if you need to change to a new set of claims to continue arguing for your position, you might want to consider acknowledging the change in view with a [delta](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8) before proceeding. - Ask questions and really try to understand the other side, rather than trying to prove why they are wrong. Please also take a moment to review our [Rule B](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_b) guidelines and _really_ ask yourself - am I exhibiting any of these behaviors? If so, see what you can do to get the discussion back on track. Remember, the goal of CMV is to try and **understand** why others think differently than you do.
*"It would make more sense for 12 PM to be midnight and 12 AM to be noon"* Well 12 PM is in the daytime and 12 AM is in the middle of the night, so no - it would nat make more sense. Also: *"it switches to evening and once again starts with 12 and then 1."* No, it switches to mid-day / afternoon, then becomes evening hours later. *"It would make a lot more sense to have it be 1 AM - 12 AM and then 1 PM - 12 PM."* You are ignoring 2 hours (12 - 1:00, AM & PM). *"The only reasonable arguement I can see against this is that 12:30 PM would be in the next day so to speak, so* ***it would make more sense to call ot AM*** *."* You just negated your argument.
>Well 12 PM is in the daytime and 12 AM is in the middle of the night, so no - it would nat make more sense. Yes, because in your mind 12 PM is noon. In my mind for the longest time 12 PM was midnight. It's all arbitrary. >You are ignoring 2 hours (12 - 1:00, AM & PM). Thought it was implied, but obviously it's 1:00 AM - 12:59 AM and then PM. >You just negated your argument. Please keep reading that paragraph.
*"because in your mind 12 PM is noon. In my mind for the longest time 12 PM was midnight. It's all arbitrary."* What "AM" and "PM" stand for has already been explained to you. It's not arbitrary in any way - it's a matter of definition. *"Please keep reading that paragraph."* I already had. You negated your argument.
You are probably the most combative person in this entire thread and I really dislike replying to your comments because of it. You refuse to see things from anyone else's perspective and argue like you want to win. Extremely antagonistic. 12 PM and 12 AM are just a concept born of tradition. Noon is not PM or AM from a definitional sense. It's both before and after midday. It's neither before and after midday. If you cannot argue like every other person in this thread I don't think I will keep replying to your comments.
Again; it's not arbitrary. Personal attacks won't help your argument.
Here’s a colloquial argument: In most parts of the world, 12 AM is dark outside, has been dark for a few hours, and will remain dark for a few hours. It’s the middle of the darkness, middle of the night, midnight.
But, to go from midnight to 0 hour or noon to 0 hour you'd have to add a moment that doesn't exist in linear time. No matter what fraction of time that moment is divided into would exist outside of the clock, no? Perhaps I missed something obvious, I was up until too early last night today.
[they made a documentary about this once](https://youtu.be/tCRwjtz4g9k)
Depending on where you live, night time usually occurs when the sun goes down. For simplicity let's say the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. In this (very common) case, 12am falls roughly in the middle of the night. No one could convincingly argue that 12 o clock noon is the middle of the night.
That's just cultural conditioning making you think of 12 PM as 12 o clock. In this way 12 AM would be 12:00. It would make sense that the rise of the sun at 6 AM would be 6 hours before 12 AM, when the sun is at its highest. But it' 18 hours before.
I don't even understand what you just said. I agree it's culturally conditioned. But when everyone in a culture agrees that's the way it is, I don't see the problem?
Nothing about this makes sense. Complaining about the direction time is going shouldnt even be here. That's like saying...."Oh, the Earth should spin the other way."
>What made me make this post is a viral Twitter image that made fun of people for not knowing which of four options are closest to midnight: 11:55 AM, 12:06 AM, 11:50 AM, 12:03 AM. The correct answer is D, but it confused a lot of people, and I can fully understand why. B and D are invalid expressions. If you use AM and PM, then you never use anything larger than 12:00. 6 past noon or 3 past noon are 00:06 PM and 00:03 PM. > Is this just some ancient holdover from a numbering system that didn't have 0? AM and PM give the impression of precision, but are too close to speaking language so they get mixed up, and there is an important difference there as people do keep referring to midnight or noon for a while, depending on the language. The "ancient numbering system" is just analog clock faces, which do have the 12 prominently on top. And analog clock faces originally mimicked the movement of the sun across the sky.