P. S.
Days begin at dawn. (ALTERNATIVELY: Days end at dusk.) Days don't begin at midnight. Hence "-night". This was not a problem until scientists came along with their 24-hour synchrotrons or whatever. Decent people were asleep until dawn, and everyone else just had to deal with it. Saying days begin at midnight is as arbitrary as saying days begin at noon. It doesn't take the human condition into account.
posted by apk01004 at 4:08 AM
4 Comments:
I was with you untill you began wildly combining your enemies.
You are perfectly right to complain when delinquent taxonomers insist on reclassifying the rhaspberry based on poorly chosen criteria.
Sensible people may even concede that we should not leave the drawing of lines between seasons to astronomers who do not even want to live in the same world as the rest of us.
However,
The four and twenty hour day that begins and ends at midnight is not imposed on us by scientists, but by administrators. The administrators who first implemented this scheme observed that society can function most aptly if the date changes when a maximum portion of the population is sleeping. If you assume that everybody sleeps for the duration of a randomly chosen continuous eight hour period between dusk and dawn (which, by the way, is absolutely what everybody should be doing) then 12:00 AM is the very instant around which you will find the most people sleeping.
How could such a convention possibly do any harm?
Well I guess you would have a point, if it were the administrators who defined our time periods for us. It is most convenient to change days when the fewest people care (Even though that isn't actually at midnight and more like at 3 AM).
But we're talking about the way actual people talk. When Jones says "It's a new day," he doesn't mean "The sun is due north/south of a point directly underfoot."
He means, "The sun is rising, the birds are singing, and I have to go to work soon."
You might say that now, when Jones says "It's a new day," what he means is "It's midnight," because he has internalized this new stupid rule. Perhaps Jones does mean that. But he only means that because someone decided to publicize midnight as when a new day begins. If they had chosen 1 AM, Jones might believe 1 AM is when a new day begins.
Jones only believes that days begin at midnight because they reclassified them that way, which they did *before* anybody believed days began at midnight.
When people leave closed nightclubs and run into their stupid friends on the street, they do not say 'good morning'. If they do say it, they are trying to be funny and failing.
Exactly.
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