I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace.

I use these all the time, my kids say "just tell me what time it is."

Old man yelling at clouds checking in. I understand the prevalence of digital, but still can't wrap my head around younger people not understanding how to read an analog clock.

Come to Germany. We still argue about how to properly say that. In some regions "quarter nine" means 8:15.

KDE for years had a clock option called "fuzzy clock" where you could set the granularity of time, either in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minute resolution. So it would just say "five to six" or whatever in words. It was designed to keep you from clock watching while working. Not sure if it exists anymore :)

I went to public school in the 80s and every classroom had a very large analog clock on the wall. Even back then, it mildly annoyed me when teachers and other adults would say "half past" and so on. It always sounded archaic to my ears, even 40+ years ago.

I also get annoyed when people say "two thousand and twenty-four" for the year. Just say "twenty twenty-four". We didn't say "one thousand nine-hundred and eighty-four" back in the day, we said "nineteen eighty-four".

Nowadays is easier just to say the precise time down to the minute.

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Why would the use of analog or digital clocks affect that? Quarter is 1/4th of an hour = 15 minutes. I don't see the correlation and I can't confirm it from personal experience either.

Strange, nothing has changed in my experience. It's a general way to tell the time, not exclusive to analog clocks.

I was thinking the other day that I never hear the phrase "bottom of the hour" (meaning __:30) anymore.

Laughs in Austrian.

The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.

eg:
3:15 -> "viertel vier" = "quarter four"
3:30 -> "halb vier" ("hoiba viere" in dialekt) = "half four"
3:45 -> "dreiviertel vier" = "three quarters four"

I generally avoided use of the quarter/half shorthand because people often say it with no context.

“What time is it?”

“Half past.”

Half past what? Sort of an assumption that the asker has a clue what hour it is, but if they knew, why would they ask the time?

I’m not sad to see the phrases go.

A quarter to 1400 does sound a bit odd.

Not in Norway lol. If you want to meet up at 11:20 you say "ti på halv tolv" meaning "ten minutes before half hour before twelve.
Yeah, it took me a while to wrap my head around it too.

It does not make sense to convert digits to figure of speech, just for the fuck of it.

In Lesotho (and I assume other developing countries that teach the English standard) they use those phrases because the 24-hour day and 60-minute hours are a foreign concept to many kids and their families.

I rarely even bother using 12 hour time any more.

I hear these phrases(the romanian version) much more often than an exact time

This is also how i was taught time in english

My internal clock runs on a circle... So if I am guessing or saying roughly the time I will use "quarter to", "ten past", etc. If it's an exact time I will say it to the minute, 6:43 etc.

Never saw the point. It doesn't save syllables, and people unaccustomed to it get confused

I don't get why, it's not like they aren't learning fractions these days right?

I haven't noticed any changes

I'm not sure. Anecdotal evidence, but when I was little, we learned how to read analog clocks, and all the "half past whatever" terminology. Actually, I think most of us in my class at that time primarily used analog clocks. Even then, we never used those sorts of phrases. We would just round to the nearest 5 minutes if anyone asked.

That's still what I do nowadays. Of course, there's phones and computers now that can tell you the time, but if I want a physical clock, I prefer to get an analog one. And I still just round to the nearest 5 minutes.

In my interpretation, those phrases fell out of favor a long time ago

I still hear people talk about the top and bottom of the hour all the time.

I'm 46 and for as long as I can remember I've used "half past" and "quarter to" etc. Even during the years when I used a digital watch I transferred to do this now often than not. I'll use it with my Kuga as well and they understand and often do the same.

I think everybody puts too much emphasis on it being a strict generational thing while imo it's mostly a force of habit.

I'm on my early 20s, and used to take around 10 seconds to read an analog clock. Fully digital mind. Bought an analog wrist watch this summer and merely 1-2 months into wearing it I started understanding it instantaneously and all of "half past" type phrases click immediately now.

Since using AM and PM are essentially analogue standards, will people eventually stop saying "it's two o'clock" when they mean "the time is fourteen hundred"?

Dave Allen on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI

It's becausee with digital clocks it's easier to just read the exact time which used to be less convenient. So. Reading digital clocks easy: Juat read what you see. Reading traditionap clocks easy: quarters and halves are a great way to simplify and fasten the time that it takes to tell what time it exactly is.

We have strayed so far from God

I have almost never heard people use quarter or half to tell time.

Last summer, I was in a water park, one of the few people still wearing a watch. A man asked me what time it was, and I replied "half past one and ten minutes". To me, this was completely natural, and I didn't even think about it. I'll never forget his confused look. You could almost see slight movements under his hair as the wheels in his brain worked overtime to translate it into digital time...