h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's all this talk of "fortnight"? It's so simple, I slept all night in the fort. It was a fortnight. As opposed to " I spent the night in the doghouse, it was a shitty night."

...shades of Battlestar Galactia and it's centons, magacentons, centicentons and whatnot..

I actually like the practice of figuring out time in terms of seconds. It certainly makes more sense than having to deal with units of minutes, hours, days and etc. Vernor Vinge in "A Deepness Upon The Sky" used decimal seconds (I think) in a setting of interstellar slower-than-light star ships. It made sense especially since the day and year at any given destination would be different than the last destination.

By the way, as of late I make my living writing imbedded systems software (doesn't run on a personal computer) for a line of digital 'master' clocks. "Time waits for no man" I should know..

Why all the bother about the term 'fortnight'? It is a given amount of time, surely, but hardly an important one. We call it 'two weeks' when ever we don't call it 'to uger', which is the same but in our own, regularly spoken, language.
Why worry so much about a term for two weeks when your petty () language still lacks a more basic form of time: The 24-hour period running from one midnight to the next. Danes call it 'døgn', Swedes prefer 'dygn' and I'm sure even Russians have a word, albeit none that I actually know.
Take a look at the forum http://www.h2g2.com/forumframe.cgi?thread=13823&forum=16161#p49158 somewhere almost halfway down. There we, a bunch of very serious people, debated the whole thing about this term. In lack of any good word, we decided upon inventing a new word entirely.
If nobody objects and if we can find a dictionary to print it is, the correct term would from now on be - an eblat!
You could choose to ignore everything on the new word, consider us a bunch of weirdoes, which would make some of us happy, and just carry on wondering what to call said amount of time.
But I tell you, English is in want of such a word!

Maybe it came out of the holiday industry, "fourteen nights" being abbreviated to "fortnight". I don't mind calling it an Eblat, but everybody else has to do so too, or I'll feel a right prat

Well, I don't know about everybody...
But notable people like Vestboy, Olaf the, er, Hesitant, the Duke of Dunstable and my humble self all use this lovely word.

Look at this way: Not everybody uses the word 'lavatory', but that doesn't mean that there are none in the world, right? Fortunately...

The confusion might stem from the fact that the 24 hour midnight-to-midnight entity and the illuminated by the sun entity share the name "day".

True, but possibly unhelpful...

*shivers*
Yes - the combination of rapid onset of flu and nicoteen withdrawal (10 days) is making me terse and unhelpful. I shall have to log off until I'm a bit more sociable....*sniffle*



[17/12/1999 15:23GMT]

Ten eblats with servere withdrawal AND a flu?
I feel very VERY sorry for you. Really!

But it just doesn't help us regarding the fact that when somebody says 'she worked three days in a row' it is unclear what happened.
Did she work three normal working-hours in three days or did she work 72 hours straight?
If I am to be honest, and I suppose I am, maybe 'eblat' is not THE word to use. But hey, then borrow the word from a language allready having it.
Danish 'døgn' or in English 'dogn' or 'degn'...
Swedish 'dygn' which fits snugly into English pronounciation.
Does anybody know the Latin word? English is full of Latin words, one more would do it no harm.

"XIVDIEM"

I see.
Assuming that this was the Latin word for the aforementioned timespan, I'll have to say that it does not lend itself very well to English pronounciation.
Xivdiem...
Sievedjeem? Sivdajeem?
This needs more work!

Eblat?

Flu going, cold turkey on the wane, civility imminent.

Anyhow - it seems you may have written that last word backwards...meidvix seems much more pronouncable.

How about "clockspan"? Or "rotation"...very sci-fi.

Thus I am 28 orbits and half a rotation old today.


[The opinions in this posting are those of the alcohol consumed by this corporal being and in no way represent what a sober version might do or think].

[Are we to await with bated breath for the sober version?]

Surely not. Xivdiem - Meidvix.

Yah, he could be on to something.

Now what?

The sober version has just watched the dawn of the solar millennium on TV (see http://www.rte.ie ) at the newgrange neolithic site - and realised that this is a very old question indeed....it certainly predates the Romans.

Sorry - that should be pre-dates

Yes, you don't want to get predatory with the Romans.

I quite like meidvix, especially if given a French pronunciation, when it could come out as "Mavis". I'd like to say "I'm going away for a Mavis."

Mavis...
If I didn't know the bacjkground for that one, I would like it. But as I do know the background, I'm not so sure...

The time for recalculating days is NOW: firstly, there's the METRIC calendar, which is all based upon ten (and will really screw up the American people,who are still using American-Imperial measure while the rest of the world is metric), and the newest thing for the Net:
World-beat time (nothing to do with dance or music, honestly...)

This beat system is to avoid having to recalculate times of day for different time-zones, both locally and internationally. With everyone using the Beat system (check out Dr. Tomorrow's page for the details, I don't konw or use them), there's no confusion about meeting or calling someone in a different time-zone (providing they're using the Beat system too, of course).

Fruitbat

I rather suspect that both Xivdiem and Meidvix were characters from an Asterix book that didn't make the cut - they either were killed off by the Romans, or had names that were both unpronoucable (even in translation) and unfunny.

Fruitbat

Welll - why make it simple!

I'll go look up that tomorrow-thingy, just so that I may annoy my Internet-friends.
See you in an eblat or two.

Is it pedantic or pernickity???
(apologies for spelling)