Me: “I’ll pick you up at the tennis court at half-past.”
Sophie: “Half-past??!”
Me: “C’mon Eli, I want to get there by 6:00. It’s already five-of.”
Eli: “Five-what??!”
Me: “We’re meeting at the restaurant at quarter-to seven.”
Sophie: “No one says that anymore, dad. It’s six-forty-five.”
I got my first digital clock in high school, maybe around 1976. ‘Digital’ meaning the display showed hours and minutes in digits, not a clock face with hands. This isn’t the meaning of digital today, which pertains to binary code and computer technology. My first digital clock operated analog-ly. Numbers on small metal plates showed through a clear plastic screen. Every minute, the gearing inside the clock would force the next number to flip down. Every ten minutes, two plates flipped. At ten o’clock and one o’clock, both day and night, all four plates would flip simultaneously, making a whisper of a clickclickclickclick sound. At night, I laid in bed, breath held, straining to hear that sound—three or four plates dropping at once. How many times did I fall asleep two minutes before the hour anticipating this new and exciting event?
It’s impossible for me to write about this topic without mentioning the movie Groundhog Day. Daily, a close-up of Bill Murray’s digital clock radio—with metal numbers like I described—shows the time changing from 5:59 to 6:00. The radio pops on to play the trailing bars of the Sonny and Cher classic, I Got You Babe. Two radio DJs, wired on caffeine and god knows what else, energetically (obnoxiously) banter back and forth like only 1980’s radio personalities can. By the time Groundhog Day came out in 1983, the metal-plate digital clock was already outdated. The world moved on to LED clocks, truly digital, run by computer chips, not gears. It’s part of the joke, the audience is supposed to react “Heh, heh, remember those clocks?” That close-up view of the clock happens eleven times throughout the movie. The clock is one of the film’s main characters.
I’m old-school. We still have three analog clocks in my house. One on my back porch that chimes with a different bird call every hour. One in our family room that runs five minutes slow, even after we reset it. And one in the master bathroom that somehow manages to be set to Daylight Savings Time in the winter and Standard Time in the summer. It’s always an hour off, but I only look at that clock in the mirror when I shave, so I can never figure out what time it is anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong.
As a kid, all our clocks were analog—circular with moving hands, numbers representing hours surrounded the face. Nowhere did the clock portray minutes. The minutes were just something you learned as a child. I’m not sure this was true for everyone, but when thinking about time, I never thought higher than thirty minutes. In my house growing up, telling time went like this:
Five o’clock
Five-ten
Five-twenty
Five-thirty
Twenty-till-six
Ten-till-six
Six o’clock
Since my kids learned to tell time on digital clocks, saying five-fifteen makes sense to them. It shows those numbers right on the clock. Because the clock no longer looks like a pie, they never think in quarter hours. Quarter-past-five has become a meaningless phrase.
For me, old habits die hard. When my kids were tweens, we allowed them iPods for a few years before we deemed them old enough to own cellphones. Only I always called their iPods, Walkmans. “Hey put down your Walkman and come help me rake the yard.” This always spurred a bout of good-natured snickering. “Walkman? Dad, this isn’t the fifties.”
Cue my fatherly lecture: “No, son, the first Walkman didn’t come out until 1979…” I never told them that prior to the Walkman, my only portable music device was a transistor radio with a single ear plug. Headphones then were still the big, bulky things that music lovers have returned to over the past eight to ten years.
I find it curious how some phrases endure—ringtones, when was the last time you heard a phone ring, rolling down your window, calling a movie a film—while other phrases become passe. I’ll never condition myself to say five-fifty-five. That will forever be five-of-six to me. I suspect that by the time the last of the boomers die out, counting down to the next hour, twenty-till, ten-till, five-of will forever disappear. We’ll lose this elegant convention and simply blurt out the numbers shown on the digital clock—just another sad casualty of the modern era.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
