Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
Its because in America most people’s only experience with it is when the movie says “meet here at 0700 hrs.” Really isn’t much deeper than that, we also call “ranger green” “ranger green” whether an army ranger is wearing it or not, despite it really being “just a shade of green.” Sometimes things are just called things.
If this was a case of things just being called things, it would be its own word. For example, a door is called a door because things are just called things. But military time is obviously a reference to something entirely different, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with time. So there’s more to it than just being called that.
Ranger green is called like that, because it’s the shade of green rangers wear. And not “just because”. Same with military time. It’s called like that because people associate it with military, be it from seeing it in military movies, or by using it in the military themselves.
For the people where 24h time is normal …. Is that a more recent development it’s the ubiquity of digital clocks, or would people have also used 24h time with analog clocks, despite them not having a way to display that?
—- looking around, realizing I still hav analog clocks all over because I wanted my kids to be familiar with them. That boat sailed
There are watches that have an actual 24hr face as you describe the normal 6 position is 12 and 12 becomes 24. Which I think are fairly uncommon, I don’t recall ever seeing one in person.
More common to just see analog watches with dual time markings say a 24 under the 12.
An image search along the lines of “24hr watch face” will show some examples.
Yes they are pretty uncommon, all the ones I have owned were old Russian ones that could be pretty unreliable and watch makers never wanted to touch them in terms of repairing them, hence why I have had a few. I believe the ones I had were made by ‘Raketa’
As someone who really needs to visualize my day, I love phone and watch apps that use a 24h watch face. It’s very logical to display sunrise/sunset times and I even found an app that displays my calendar events as time slices in my clock pie.
Always wanted to pick up a cool analog 24h watch too.
we have analog clocks because my wife has forbidden us from living in a minimalist glass and chrome cube where the only decoration is neon lighting and we only wear latex body suits and sunglasses indoors 😿
For the people where 24h time is normal …. Is that a more recent development it’s the ubiquity of digital clocks, or would people have also used 24h time with analog clocks, despite them not having a way to display that?
I’ve been born in central Europe in the 80’s before digital clocks became the norm. 24h was normal even then when writing the precise time. For example in TV schedules. When talking we normally use 12h but without adding AM or PM as it most often is obvious from the context. When it’s not then we add “in the morning” “at night”. Actually speaking time in a 24h format is very rare. But since it’s always encountered in writing, every child learns very early how the 24h system works.
Fascinating. Here in the US it seems similar when talking, but I almost never see 24 hour time, even in writing, except in “military” or similar context. Plus I really haven’t noticed any changes in these habits during my adult lifetime.
In Brazil it has just always been this way. We have normal 12h clock faces and we are used to both 24h and 12h time. The curious thing is that we are used to read and write in 24h, but in speaking the vast majority uses 12h. Probably because it’s shorter to say “nove e meia” than “vinte e uma e trinta” for 09:30/21:30
Because the average American is much more likely to bump into American military personnel than people from countries that use 24 hour time. It’s really as simple as that.
The entire US logistics chain runs on 24 hour time, even the 100% domestic aspects.
The logistics chain would also save tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year if we ended daylight savings time and time zones, and collectively is one of the biggest lobbies for those changes
Logistics uses 24 hr clocks to be as precise as possible
The reasoning for lost revenue is a long story, but to heavily TLDR it, the entire logistics chain is basically a giant house of cards, and every mistake compounds repeatedly. Everything from a scheduling error at one warehouse to a driver not knowing about weird time zones (like AZ), to international miscommunications, all pile up on both their own individual load/order and every other step in the chain. A mistake at one manufacturer rolls to the next manufacturer, which then snowballs to the receiver, influencing timing on the last mile delivery.
Because of the heavily interconnected nature, any mistake in documentation, ordering, or timing causes significant delays and missed revenue elsewhere.
Military time chart is common because there is less confusion on what time something starts or ends. Why is just because people that use it are usually connected to the military in some way.
Our country is so big and heavily populated (and most of our many, many populated areas are overshadowed by a few really touristy places like New York, the Disney parks and Yellowstone National Park and Hawaii which isn’t even that American) and that you’ll rarely encounter someone from a country that uses the 24 hour system. Canada uses the 12-hour clock if I remember correctly from when I last went there, and I think Mexico does since we usually learn their dialect of Spanish in school (but I’m not sure, in all my spanish classes they taught us to say “son las ocho y media en la noche” for 8:30 PM, instead of “veinte y media horas” as I was taught when I studied in Spain for a semester)
Nobody says “veinte y media”. It’s “veinte treinta”, and everyone understands that and it’s shorter than “ocho y media de la noche”, which everyone understands as well. They’re completely interchangeable and nobody would find either strange or unusual.
It may be rare to find someone who uses it in regular conversation, but medical, logistics, IT, and military commonly used it… Everyone likely knows a few people that use it.
But in Europe we don’t say German Mean Time or Spanish Mean Time when changing to summer time. We increment GMT+1. So it becomes GMT+2. Then we revert back to GMT+1 in winter.
Different countries that observe DTS pick different days to do the switches. Also the closer to the equator you wre the higher likelyhood they dont observe it at all.
The point is that GMT isn’t changing, the region is switching to an entirely different time zone, BST (British Summer Time). If your time is based on GMT, it won’t change due to British daylight saving time because GMT never changes.
For a similar example, in the part of the US that uses Mountain Time, states observe MST (Mountain Standard Time) in the winter, and most switch to MDT (Mountain Daylight Time) in the summer. However, Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, so they remain on MST. MST always stays the same (GMT-7), the time is only changing because the states are observing a different time zone. The same happens with GMT and BST, it’s just harder to see because you can’t pick out areas that remain on GMT all year.
Thank you for the correction and the reference. The only time I can think of where these sort of distinction would come into play anyway would be if you asked a person in London the time from somewhere else vs. looking it up on a website. I dont exactly have any UK friends I call to look at clocks for me.
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