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.
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.
source
That map looks quite inaccurate, I wonder where they got that info.
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…
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.
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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.