Am I the only one who thinks it’s a little weird that we end our mornings and begin our afternoons with the first stroke of the number 12 on the clock instead of number one? Wouldn’t the obvious time to separate the morning from the afternoon be at the end 12 and beginning of one? Can anyone argue with that?
And the evening is the same way; the clock tolls midnight at the beginning of 12. I’ll admit that’s more dramatic, but is it right?
I’m not saying that we should change it; it’s too deeply imbedded in our minds. I just wonder who determined that we should begin our afternoons one hour ahead of time? Could we agree that the logical time to separate the p.m. from the a.m. is the empty space between 12 and one? Isn’t this the moment when the sun is at its zenith?
That doesn’t change from season to season because it’s based on the speed of our Earth’s rotation, which is constant no matter how the Earth happens to be tilting in various seasons.
Here’s another question: since most of the world now operates on a metric system based on the number 10, why are there 12 hours in each half of a day instead of 10?
I guess it all harkens back to when many early mathematics systems were based on different references? Most so-called civilized nations of the world now use a mathematical base of 10, but many early civilizations used 12. The ancient Mayans even used a base of 20.
Some people say that the old base of 12 made more sense because it was more flexible. Twelve is divisible by five numbers: one, two, three, four and six while 10 can only be divided by three: one, two and five. I’m not sure, though, how our decimal system could have worked with a base of twelve. That would take some thinking.
Old ways die hard. For instance, if you count from one to 20, haven’t you ever wondered why the two numbers after ten are named “eleven” and “twelve” and not “oneteen” and “twoteen,” more in keeping with thirteen and fourteen, etc.? And have you wondered why the first group contains 10 numbers while the second group consists of only nine? Some of the confusion could be lessened if we consider zero to actually be a number. Mathematicians do.
If we followed their thinking and started with zero, (calling the first 10 perhaps, “the naughts”) Then 10 would be what it should be; the start of the teens, and things would be OK from the twenty’s to one hundred. I have yet to figure out how that nomenclature ties in with everything else, but we followed this thinking, the number 100 would indicate the first of the next one hundred items: days, dollars or whatever.
I have no argument as to how all of that coincides with conflicting beliefs about the beginning of the current century, but I still think it would have been January 1, 2001. But, then, we wouldn’t have had all that fun of the arguments surrounding the date.
I’m sorry, I got carried away.
I wanted to mention that, recently, I thought my truck’s muffler was shot. I took it to a local dealer — The Muffler Man — and after he went down into his pit and looked at it he didn’t tell me what I expected to hear: that it would cost a couple hundred or so dollars to replace everything in sight. He said it was only a bad connection in the pipes, ordered a new part, installed it and only charged me about thirty dollars for both parts and labor. Can you imagine that sort of service in a town of the size that so many of our community leaders want us to become?
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
