meltingman » ideas http://meltingman.co.uk/blog Steve Curati's blog Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:47:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 ‘The language of time passing’ http://meltingman.co.uk/blog/2008/12/23/the-language-of-time-passing/ http://meltingman.co.uk/blog/2008/12/23/the-language-of-time-passing/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:43:23 +0000 Steve Curati http://meltingman.co.uk/blog/2008/12/23/the-language-of-time-passing/ There was a lovely segment on R4′s Saturday Live show at the weekend. Talking about the history of telling the time, the Greenwich Observatory’s time-keeper general described ticks, whirs, cuckoos and chimes as the ‘language of time passing’. That’s such a nice way of putting it.

It also makes makes you think about how that language has changed over time. When I think about how time lets me know it’s passing now, it feels like all those lovely temporal verbs and adjectives have been stripped away to leave just a colon flashing between the numbers representing hours and minutes. And that’s sad. I want a watch with a tick and a second hand.

He also mentioned that we’re going to have a leap second as we go into the new year. At 11:59:59 on December 31st there will be a 7th ‘beep’. A gentle tug on time to put us back into sync with the rest of the universe. Don’t trip up.

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