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Not everyone knows wtf a Meridiem is.
At Morning
Post Morning
After Midnight
Weird quirk of English… why do we say “6 o’clock in the morning”, “2 o’clock in the afternoon”, and “6 o’clock in the evening”, but then we say “9 o’clock at night”? It doesnt sound right to say “at morning”, “at afternoon”, or “at evening”. You can say something happened “in the night”, but only in a non-specific way, like “she passed in the night”. But “I go to work at 11 o’clock in the night” just doesnt work.
Night was originally much harder to schedule things in since sundials didn’t work and most people historically had the same sleep schedule, so they treated night like a homogenous block
Say those words out loud and notice where your lips and tongue are when you do it.
The transition between “at morning” is more work than saying “in the morning” because of the way your mouth moves; you have to readjust between the consonants. Similarly, saying “in the night” sounds ok, and is used quite a bit in literature, but is more effort because it’s longer, and “in the night” sort of forces you to pause between “the” and “night” to adjust your mouth
I took a linguistics course where my professor presented his “theory of least effort” which basically states that words and phrases with complicated pronunciations, ones where you have to do more work to say the thing, eventually get morphed due to “laziness” in everyday speaking, basically just a lack of proper annunciation. It explains a lot of linguistic evolution, particularly prior to the printing press.
How on earth is “in the morning” less effort than “at morning”? Doubly so for “afternoon”?
Prepositions in general don’t follow regular patterns in English. I would bet on there being, if any explanation, an etymological one: the origin of morning, afternoon, evening and night are all different, so the constructions which have since been contracted away will have been different.
The sounds IN-TH-MOR progressively close your mouth as you say them. AT-…-MO requires a stop as you convert from open mouth for T and pursed lips for M. AT-NIGHT flows well because mouth and tongue position for the sound for N is almost the same as for the T sound.
I use in or at interchangeably for either of those cases, now that you’re forcing me to confront the truth
For those wondering, it’s Ante Meridiem and Post Meridiem. It’s Latin.
I’m gonna start saying that instead of using the abbreviation. "I’ll meet you at 2:30 post merideum."
I’m going to continue using the superior 24 hour time format.
based and ISO pilled
It’s After Midnight. Of course.
/j
After Midnight and Post Morning
In grade school I had the worst time remembering which was which, so I used to tell myself After Midnight and Pre Midnight lol. I absolutely knew it was Latin for something, but could never remember it for the life of me.
I think I just remembered it as A comes before P alphabetically
Arctic Monkeys and Post Malone
Ass Mongul Prostate Mongul
Anterior Mediocrity
Postus Malones
In English I just call her Auntie Miriam.
So much better than Aunt Irma
What did you call me?
Duschlampe
no u
BURN!
Thank you!
It might have been a play on words and the acronym:
- AM
- hard worker
- still up
- at mourning
- lost a lot of people
- AM
When he dies will he be renamed as seventhirty’spostmortem?
But have you seen his brother, Eightfortyfivepremidnight?
It stands for amplitude modulation obviously
PM
Probably maybe
pat mnight
