Which comes first, drunk o’clock or stupid-thirty?
The term “real time” has become such a part of English that we have forgotten how unreal it sounds. Earlier this month, Google announced it would be adding real-time information to its search results, and we already expect real-time information about all sorts of other things: traffic, weather, stock quotes, flight tracking – for some reason, we feel we need to know about all the boring hassles of our lives with split-second precision.
But when we’re telling stories, when we’re sharing personal, emotional information, we rely on “unreal times.” We want times that relate to experiences, not to abstractions. We’ve always had flexible times in English (lunch time, teatime, nap time) and times that, while tethered to the clock, convey much more than flashing numbers can get across: midnight, high noon.
And there are other times – just as real, in a sense – that have never seen a clock, much less a traffic-and-weather update. If you listen (especially online, the Disneyland of data for the language researcher!), you can find a whole clock full of unreal times.
Anyone who has a kid, or remembers being one, knows some snappy (and unreal) answers to “What time is it?” There are those meant to highlight the fact that you don’t have a watch, such as skin-thirty and half past a freckle (and quarter till an elbow). Then there are the ones that say “it doesn’t matter what time it is,” like half past kissing time and time to kiss again! or – the one that drives my child insane – time for all the monkeys’ tails to fall off; isn’t yours loose?
Once you’re past the playground, though, unreal times get a bit less whimsical and a bit more evocative, offered less in answer to idle questions than in service to good storytelling: When did this interesting thing happen? Wrong-thirty. Or oh-dark-thirty. Or drunk o’clock.
Some of these terms have been around for a while: The Historical Dictionary of American Slang has evidence of oh-dark-thirty in military lingo from at least the 1980s, and, being slang, these phrases are more than likely older than that. (I have strong memories of my ex-Army father waking us up at oh-dark-thirty - and calling it that – in the 1970s.)
These unreal times are really about the way time feels. And perhaps not surprisingly, alcohol and drugs, which often play a role in disassociating from reality, are responsible for a whole roster of unreal times. For some people, there’s happy hour. For others there’s drink-thirty – or, depending on your tipple of choice, vodka-thirty, wine-thirty, or whiskey-thirty. Maybe it’s even a quarter to bourbon, or, as it’s put in the Brooks and Dunn song, “It’s beer-thirty, a honky tonk time.”
Some people’s happy hours start at shooter-thirty, when they take their first shot. These go far beyond Miller Time, and they don’t end until biller time, when people have to settle up their bar tab – possibly the realest of these boozy unreal hours.
Of course, after drink-thirty comes drunk-thirty, after which possibly comes passout-thirty, if you ignored calls for moderation. And according to Urban Dictionary, those who use illegal substances describe the earliest time their dealer can be called as drug-thirty (or sometimes Jake-thirty). Similarly, smoke-thirty is when you can break for a cigarette, chew-thirty is when it’s acceptable to use smokeless tobacco. The more genteel types indulge at tea-thirty and at chocolate-thirty - and life would be better if we all took a break at nap-thirty.
One advantage of unreal times is that they can happen simultaneously. In real time, it can’t be 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. at once, but in unreal time, it’s certainly possible for it to be both drunk o’clock and stupid-thirty. (In fact, those may be different names for the exact same time, much like noon and 12 p.m.) Soon after, we have sad o’clock and regret o’clock or possibly even uh-oh-thirty.
You might think that jerk o’clock would be the hour when you might encounter the most jerks, but it’s one of the many terms used for the early hours of the morning. It has many cousins, including grumpy-thirty in the morning, wrong-thirty, early o’clock, and dark-thirty. In the military, there’s oh-dark-hundred hours; for the rest of us, there’s dawn o’clock or oh-hell-thirty. Not wanting to get up early in the morning (and now, Tweeting about it) seems to be a human universal: Think of any common expletive and it’s possible to add a.m., o’clock, or make it part of (oh)-expletive-thirty to convey a miserable time to be up and at ’em. On the opposite end of the day, hella-thirty is usually used to express the extreme lateness of an hour, as is dark o’clock.
Dork o’clock can be early in the morning, or it can be any time that dorky behavior is exhibited – in the same way that geek o’clock is a time for geeking out, and nerd-thirty is for nerdishly obsessing about things. And all of these have another, more universal use: to describe showing up at a social event or a concert uncomfortably or awkwardly early.
These unreal times convey a universal emotional GMT that the actual hours may not: Your shenanigans o’clock might fall at 10 p.m., while mine never starts before 2 a.m., but we both know what happens when that hour strikes. Using these terms in our anecdotes cements our shared experience, even if we’re in different metaphorical time zones. Like the more standard and familiar dawn and dusk, they’re immediately evocative, and accurate in a way that even the most precise atomic clock could never be.
Erin McKean, Boston Globe
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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/27/unreal_time/
