Re: Military time (whoops!)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Paul Ambos wrote:
> Despite Theodore Bernstein, the convention is that 12:00 a.m. is midnight,
> and 12:00 p.m. noon, although style and clarity call for "midnight" or
> "noon" (without any "12"). Universal Military Time prefers "0000" for
> midnight, and this is typically displayed on military-time watches, although
> "2400" is in fairly common usage by many.
>
> Not a life and death issue.
It is Life and death for journalists reporting things
that happen on the other side of the globe from their
readers. (I've read some accounts where it was totally
unclear when something had happened.) The copy chief of
the NYT was, I think highly properly, using his
position to try to enforce a consistent, logical system
of nomenclature. That's one of the things editors and
usage gurus DO: common usage is very often muddled and
unclear; our job is to spot the confusions and
recommend ways to clear them up. There was not, really,
 a consistent pattern of usage by which 'that' was
used for defining clauses and 'which' for nondefining
until Fowler advocated it. At most there was an
incipient tendency, which he latched onto and elevated
into a principle--thereby, IMO, making the English
language a bit more precise.
"2400" (Twenty four hundred") is a darn sight easier to
verbalize than 0000, which would be what? Oh Oh? oh
ought hours? (The zeros in mil time are usually--at
least by the CO of our local Office of Emergency
Management, who uses it all the time--as "Oh": "Meeting
at oh eight hundred hours.")

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx