Where I can, I just say "noon" and "midnight". 12-hour time is frustrating because of this 0 == 12 bullshit
> There is no am/pm on the 12.
> it’s fairly easily to tell which of them you are at unless you are close to the poles
> we’ve managed to cope this long with them.
Like throwing a ball up into air, there is no time where it is not either rising or falling, but there is a point where it transitions from one to the other.
So midday is 12:00pm. As soon as the moment has been observed it has passed, and you are now "post meridiem".
Midday and midnight are points in time that have no duration -- as soon as they are observed they are passed, so midnight is 12am and midday is 12pm.
This is easier to visualise on an analogue clock with a continuous seconds hand. Although the hand sweeps past 12 it spends no time there.
Alternatively think of a digital clock with very high precision. While your ordinary clock will show 12:00pm at midday for a full minute, your high precision clock might be showing 12:00:00.0000001 -- indisputably "post meridiem".
It’s really not difficult, or are you doing that juvenile bit where derision masks the incompetence you admitted to?
Just remember A comes before P.
But on a related note, do you tell people you will meet at 16 or 22 o’clock? I guess if you speak some other language that strongly types time with “…Uhr”, “…Uur”, “kl.…” it makes sense that you might not notice a difference. We can just say 4 or 10 and no one is confused, based on context, that it does not mean in the middle of the night or next morning, unless of course it’s a morning related context.
It’s simply far more human oriented, just like the US Customary Measurement system is a human scale system because it was devised by humans for practical reasons and purposes, to work quickly and efficiently, not necessarily to a nanometer precision. The different systems can exist at the same time, your zealous mindset notwithstanding.
Why is this stuff challenging, it feels like reddit over here. My point is that saying "we will meet at 4" is more human scale than "we will meet at 16" because it segments the context window into morning and afternoon for which most humans and situations do not require additional external context to put meaning to.
You'd be surprised but people in Europe also don't say "sixteen o'clock", they say "four" or "seven in the evening" if it is ambiguous. But at the same time the physical clocks and texts between people have completely clear and unambiguous time, one can understand it instantly. Why with British/USA time, when the clock is between 12 and 1, I always need to stop and analyze which of the bullshit time segments it is referencing, because of the wrong order of numbers, starting at 12, then going back to 1, then forward to 2 etc.
But when being less precise, we might say any of "half two this afternoon", "two thirty pm", or "fourteen thirty" depending on context.
As we do still use the 12 hour clock in less-formal situations, using an "oh" prefix for times before 1000 gives an extra point of disambiguation.
In France we just say "let's meet tomorrow at 8 hours" for example, to which the person has to ask something like "Wait, do you mean at 8 hours or 20 hours?"
It's usually obvious from the context, but not always.
We have Dinner at 6, not 18:00 (people would be frowning if you'd say 18:00 out loud there). In messages I think I'm one of the few that always says "16:15" because I just hate ambiguity. If context does not clarify enough people say "in the morning/afternoon/evening/night But (easily) arguably "context" is even worse than AM/PM! Though I can't remember this going wrong ever.
I remember as a kid looking at a digital clock and subtracting 2, then dropping the leading 1 to get a "feel" for the time. Nowadays I'm 24h native and don't like the ambiguity of 12 hr references.
I set al my clocks to 24 hr (unless they have arms).
So yeah, here we are, all cool with our "military time", ahum.
It's significantly easier to use a 24-hour clock and get rid of AM and PM. In fact, it's so easy to use 24 hours that I use it exclusively for my internal time, and I do commonly get confused by times like 12AM - is it day or night? It has a 12 instead of a 0, somewhat confusing.
I also refuse that the metric system is more difficult for human scale measurements. Ever since I switched, I have had a stronger fundamental connection to the units, and I can visualize the world better. It's significantly easier, and I would call it MORE human oriented.