Forum > Today's Puzzles
Sat., 8/22 Barry C. Silk
(1/1)
magus:
THEME: none, but four triples
GOOD ONES:
Positive ABOVE ZERO [wasn't thinking math]
Charts featuring houses HOROSCOPES [wasn't thinking astrology]
Nice relatives TANTES […but we know "La plume de ma tante…"]
BTW:
French possessive TES [but we don't know, use, or care about French "persons"] :)
Lots of Z's and X's today!
RATING: ;D ;D
Three grins = Loved it; Two grins = Enjoyed it; One grin = A bit bland for my taste; One teardrop = Not much fun
Thomps2525:
The Daily News crossword includes the clue "End of time" for OCLOCK. I wonder why we say such things as "one o'clock" or "three o'clock." We don't say we weigh "175 o'scale" and we don't say the temperature is "78 o'thermometer" and we don't say a piece of lumber is "24 inches o'yardstick" so why do we use the word "o'clock" when we announce what time it is? It seems rather o'illogical.
magus:
I suspect that town criers called out the time ("Two o'clock and all is well!") It meant "two on the clock." Simply calling "Two" may have felt too vague. Of course, he might have called "Two hours" as our military does, but "o'clock" became tradition. That time semantics does not conform to other measurements is not atypical of our "illogical" language. For example the inflected -s is only found in the third person singular of the present tense. Language, after all, is not mathematics.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
Go to full version