Military Time vs 24hr?
Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
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Our country is so big and heavily populated (and most of our many, many populated areas are overshadowed by a few really touristy places like New York, the Disney parks and Yellowstone National Park and Hawaii which isn’t even that American) and that you’ll rarely encounter someone from a country that uses the 24 hour system. Canada uses the 12-hour clock if I remember correctly from when I last went there, and I think Mexico does since we usually learn their dialect of Spanish in school (but I’m not sure, in all my spanish classes they taught us to say “son las ocho y media en la noche” for 8:30 PM, instead of “veinte y media horas” as I was taught when I studied in Spain for a semester)
Most countries that use 24h time (Western Europe, ime) use both interchangeably - saying "at 18" or "at six in the evening" are both totally normal.
Just to add to this. I found a map on Wikipedia that shows this.
That map looks quite inaccurate, I wonder where they got that info.
Nobody says "veinte y media". It's "veinte treinta", and everyone understands that and it's shorter than "ocho y media de la noche", which everyone understands as well. They're completely interchangeable and nobody would find either strange or unusual.
Quebec uses 24h, rest of Canada uses 12h.
Quebec does a lot of dumb shit that isn't consistent with the rest of Canada
Hard to consider using 24hr time amongst the 'dumb shit' though.
Agreed. I use 24 hour time on all my devices, working in IT it just makes things easier.
Shocking that a distinct society, a separate nation within Canada, has different customs…
It may be rare to find someone who uses it in regular conversation, but medical, logistics, IT, and military commonly used it... Everyone likely knows a few people that use it.
