Don't Waste Time Reading This

Today’s topic, Dear Reader, is 'Time'. We’re going to talk about time here, because I never seem to have enough of it. And I figure that if I dedicate a whole blog of Adventures in Type and Space to the subject of time and stress some of its finer points, perhaps Father Time will show his appreciation by gifting me a few extra hours each day.

 This will allow me to be able to complete a couple more important tasks like hitting the ‘Snooze’ button on my alarm clock at least 15 more times each morning.

Time is defined by the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as: ‘A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.’

This definition leads us to the obvious question: If a definition contains 20 word, 5 of which contain 10 or more letters, and it still doesn’t make much sense, isn’t it time to get another dictionary?

Of course,  folks with dictionaries aren’t the only people who have trouble with time. The ancient Mayans, for example, struggled to understand time for centuries and never got it quite right. One look at their calendar clues you in to this fact.

 The Mayan calendar had 18 months, one of which was called ChikChan (short for May), and each month had 20 days. There was even one month, Wayeb, that had only 5 days. As you can imagine, this horribly inaccurate calendar made scheduling important events like the World Series of Baseball next to impossible. 

Aztec Calendar

It also left them wide open to insults from other ancient civilizations, like the Sumerians for example, who had fairly accurate calendars.

The Sumerian calendar had 365 days per year and even incorporated a leap year. But, there was no Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Day, or Fourth of July incorporated into the Sumerian calendar which is why the Sumerian civilization was eventually wiped out. Such flagrant calendar discrimination, even in the Dark Ages, could not be tolerated.

Ancient Calendar

Since we have covered all pertinent information available about calendars, I think it’s high time we expand our understanding of time by discussing another mechanism by which we mortals judge the passing of time.

 But first, does anyone know where the phrase ‘high time’ comes from? Is there such a thing as ‘low time’. Feel free to ponder these questions quietly as we move on to discussing: The Clock.

A clock, for those of you who don’t know, is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as…Wait a second! Let’s not even go there. We’re already pretty confused as it is. Let’s just all agree that a clock is a device that has lots of numbers and two arms and makes it’s living by juggling minutes and seconds.

I feel the extreme need to insert a time cliche here. This cliche makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and probably has pagan, barbaric origins, but I think it summarizes what we’ve learned so far in our discussion. So here goes our first time cliché, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. And now back to the show.

There have been copious different kinds of clocks throughout history. Many of them made absolutely no sense whatsoever. A good example of this is the ancient Egyptian water clock, which was basically just a bowl with a hole in the bottom of it. 

Water Clock displayed in museum

There were markings on the inside of the bowl that measured the passage of ‘hours’ as the water level reached them.

One of the obvious problems with this clock was the fact that whenever working-class Egyptians wanted to get off work early they would keep taking little sips of water from the bowl/clock throughout the day.

This was one of the reasons it took so long to finish the Pyramids - that and the lack of power tools.

Time doesn’t permit us to talk about the other types of ancient clocks like obelisks, sundials, and hemicycles. And there definitely isn’t time to go into merkhets.

Speaking of merkhets, a close cousin of the clock is the watch. The watch was the time-telling device that most of us used before smartphones.  We do not often use it to tell time or make calls. We use it to do numerous other tasks that phone manufacturers have incorporated into phones like instant messaging, reading email, and looking up where to get a fresh donut that’s bigger than the cap on a jar of grape jelly. There’s even a new smartphone on the market that comes equipped with a radiation detector. And you laughed at the Egyptians for drinking from their time-telling devices!

Obviously, time is not something that can be explained in just one lesson. There’s a ton of more interesting stuff we could go into about time but, frankly, I don’t feel like taking the time to look it up right now.

I believe I’ve achieved my goal of using as many time cliches as I possibly could in one article and now, I think it’s time to call an extended timeout on this whole time subject.

I’m sure when I do write the follow-up to this article that it will be just in the nick of time - probably sometime around the third of Wayeb.

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