Disclaimer: of course, everything is a spectrum. To ADHD-people, caffeine has varying effects. Some get tired from it, others it affects less or not at all.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
298 points (91.6% liked)
memes
18987 readers
2414 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
16 hours is the "official"/military way to say it
Actually, the military way to say that would be “sixteen hundred hours”. 4:30PM would be “sixteen thirty hours”. You always specify the minutes, even when it’s zero minutes, which is notated by saying “hundred” for the double-zero.
As a math nerd, this bothers me way more than it should. The reason we say "hundred" when we read a base-ten number that ends with two zeros is because that is the place value of the final non-zero digit--it is literally one hundred times the number you've already read aloud. But in the military time version, a) the hours are not hundreds of minutes, they're groups of sixty minutes, and b) it's groups of minutes, not hours, so the units also get messed up. If someone tells you it's currently 0 hours and you should meet again at 800 hours, logic would suggest they're asking you to go away for more than a month, but in fact they're saying 8 hours, despite the difference being apparently 800 hours.
I'm aware how pedantic this is, and I'm perfectly capable of understanding what they mean because I've heard it so often in movies and whatnot. But I swear these stupid games with units contribute to keeping us dumb.
16 hours is mostly an American military way to say it. 16 on the clock (or similar for different languages) is the main European way to say it.
Well, we'd say 4 o clock... But that's English too. Have considered how the rest of Europe says it?
I have to confess that I do not know how every European language says it, but I do know that both German and Danish say and write the equivalent of "o' clock/on the clock", eg. "Klokken, Uhr".
The only time I've seen "x hours" used, is either in programming, that abomination that is "military time", or when defining time from now, eg. "Let's meet in 4 hours, at 20 on the clock".