When the clocks change I always entertain myself for a few days with the idea of consistency as we apply it in our efforts to describe what is actually happening to time. Consistency is at the heart of logic. Strictly speaking, a set of statements is consistent if and only if it is possible for all the statements to be true.
Assigning values of true or false takes place against a set of criteria, and in order to make sense of our comparisons we assign the same criteria each time we compare similar things. If my criterion for ‘bright light’ is ‘sufficient to illuminate my desk to work at’, then it is false that a candle is bright and true that a 100W bulb is bright. Change the criteria by substituting ‘football pitch’ for ‘my desk’, and both sentences are false.
What are we to make of the following English sentences then?
The clocks go forward in the spring by an hour.
We’ve brought the meeting forward by an hour.
Does ‘forward’ suggest a movement from an earlier to a later time or from a later time to an earlier time? How important is our perceived position relative to the change? I can best describe what I do when I advance the hands of my clocks as ‘turning them forward’, so that what was 7am is now 8am. By this logic the first sentence is true. By the same logic the second sentence is false, because in bringing the meeting forward we are moving from a later time to an earlier time.
There are a number of inconsistencies like this in English, many of them only apparent. This problem, for example, is only superficially similar to that of ‘an alarm going off’, where, if one were to choose a sense of termination or completion as a criterion for ‘off’, or the shutting off of operation of electric devices, one would be led to believe that the alarm has just stopped ringing. The facts are that the verb ‘to go off’ is much older than commercial electricity and that it was traditionally used to describe bursts of energy, explosions, and so on.
Coming back to ‘forward’ and ‘back’ (consider that to move a meeting back by an hour is to postpone it by that amount of time), I have aged by an hour by putting my clocks forward. Fortunately this loss will be reversed in the autumn, but is aging itself a movement forward or back? On McTaggart’s time line, whereby an event which is now present, was future, and will be past, aging is a backward movement. Or is it something to do with another one of our dearly held conventions, namely that the forward movement is a movement from left to right?
In an item heard last week scientists have tested our intuitions again by endowing ‘forward’ with the meaning it has in the sentence about rescheduling meetings rather than changing the clocks:
The seasons are moving forward across the northern hemisphere.
Assigning values of true or false takes place against a set of criteria, and in order to make sense of our comparisons we assign the same criteria each time we compare similar things. If my criterion for ‘bright light’ is ‘sufficient to illuminate my desk to work at’, then it is false that a candle is bright and true that a 100W bulb is bright. Change the criteria by substituting ‘football pitch’ for ‘my desk’, and both sentences are false.
What are we to make of the following English sentences then?
The clocks go forward in the spring by an hour.
We’ve brought the meeting forward by an hour.
Does ‘forward’ suggest a movement from an earlier to a later time or from a later time to an earlier time? How important is our perceived position relative to the change? I can best describe what I do when I advance the hands of my clocks as ‘turning them forward’, so that what was 7am is now 8am. By this logic the first sentence is true. By the same logic the second sentence is false, because in bringing the meeting forward we are moving from a later time to an earlier time.
There are a number of inconsistencies like this in English, many of them only apparent. This problem, for example, is only superficially similar to that of ‘an alarm going off’, where, if one were to choose a sense of termination or completion as a criterion for ‘off’, or the shutting off of operation of electric devices, one would be led to believe that the alarm has just stopped ringing. The facts are that the verb ‘to go off’ is much older than commercial electricity and that it was traditionally used to describe bursts of energy, explosions, and so on.
Coming back to ‘forward’ and ‘back’ (consider that to move a meeting back by an hour is to postpone it by that amount of time), I have aged by an hour by putting my clocks forward. Fortunately this loss will be reversed in the autumn, but is aging itself a movement forward or back? On McTaggart’s time line, whereby an event which is now present, was future, and will be past, aging is a backward movement. Or is it something to do with another one of our dearly held conventions, namely that the forward movement is a movement from left to right?
In an item heard last week scientists have tested our intuitions again by endowing ‘forward’ with the meaning it has in the sentence about rescheduling meetings rather than changing the clocks:
The seasons are moving forward across the northern hemisphere.
Consistency - so why do the clocks go back two months before winter solstice and forward three months after winter solstice? Surely, we should get that welcome, springlike, life-enhancing hour of extra evening daylight in late Feb, not having to wait until late March?
ReplyDeleteWho made it so?
I wish. I lament the fact that the summer solstice comes so fast and that more and more of my day is eroded as we go through the summer months. The whole idea of clock changing is bonkers, in my view. Blame Ben Franklin, just as you laud him for everything else he did for posterity. As for the clock changing dates, there is an EU directive out there laying down the law. I'm not kidding. The US dates vary from those in the EU.
ReplyDeleteBut aren't you mixing British and American English usage here? 'Bring the meeting forward', although undoubtedly adopted into BritENG, smacks of Americanism to me. I always felt the fundamental difference between BritENG and AmENG was a somehow tense related, but I've never been able to pin down exactly what it is.
ReplyDeleteThis is bad enough, but how how do I explain to my Polish wife that: "news at the top of the hour" has nothing to do with "top of the morning to you"? Exactly how many metaphorical spatial dimensions are we allowed to bring in here?
Hard to say for me whether it is AmENG or BritENG usage. I wonder if this distinction is meaningful at all these days. There has been a lot of talk and speculation about 'bringing the general election forward' in the UK this spring, enough to make me tired of hearing about it, and until Brown put an end to it by announcing it to be in May.
ReplyDeleteAs for the 'top of the hour', show your wife an episode from Dad's Army entitled Time On My Hands. A German paratrooper got suspended from the big hand of Walmington-on-Sea's town hall clock, at the top of the hour. One option is to get him down. Another is to wait for the big hand to move down the dial until he drops off by himself. A real test of Cpt Mainwairing's decision making skills. Enjoy.