Play it, Sam
No 9 in a series of articles about translating from Serbian (and other languages) into English
Time is one of those words whose meaning changes substantially with its article. Try asking a Brit: “Excuse me, what is time?” An honest answer may be something like: “an abstract concept that I would struggle to define”. While there is always a time for such questions, you may really have wanted to know the time, which of course was 11:35 AM. Had it been 25 minutes later, you may have been puzzled to hear 12 PM, which some people think correct as the day starts at midnight, which must therefore be 12 AM. However, as AM stands for the Latin Ante Meridiem, meaning ‘before midday’, and PM for Post Meridiem, meaning ‘after midday’, midday can hardly take sides, can it? Purists therefore say it is 12 M, others 12 noon. Of course, the 24-hour clock avoids the ambiguity, but also the fascinating history, which goes all the way back to Sumeria.
Time also has its ins, ons and ats. ‘In time’ is at any felicitous moment before some deadline, as in ‘they de-fused the bomb in time’; ‘just in time’ and the last few minutes were pretty scary; ‘in the nick of time’ means they were in a cold sweat. ‘On time’ is exactly at a designated moment, neither before nor after. E.g. ‘Swiss trains depart on time’. Like the arrival times though, ‘at’ is more flexible: “It exploded at 21:23” (precision, but without the t-word); “but I was asleep at the time” (a temporal point in an extended period with a defining quality), or “that was at a time when 9/11 was still in the future”.
While we are there (or is it then?), ‘in future’ is…
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