BEACHCOMBER

100 YEARS OLD AND STILL KNOWS WHAT HE MEANS...

IWAS standing patiently in a queue the other day when I heard a young fellow some places in front of me talking into a mobile telephone and saying, “I didn’t get home till half nine in the evening, know what I mean?”.

Well what he actually said was more like “Nart mean,” but I believe this is a common syllable-saving strategy among certain people. My main thoughts however were concerned not with “nart” but with his reasons for asking whether the person he was talking to knew what he meant. Where, in what he was saying, was the danger of ambiguity or incomprehensibility?

It seemed to me that “I didn’t get home” and “in the evening” left no grounds for confusion but the more I thought about “half nine”, the more I realised that the fellow was quite right in asking whether his colloquitor knew what he meant.

“Half nine” could, I suppose, mean “half of nine” which is four and a half, but neither 4.30am nor 4.30pm is in the evening, so I think we can rule that interpretation out.

So probably what he meant was “half past nine” but I have never quite understood why some people omit the word “past”. I fully understand that in certain parts of the country, a local dialect is employed which does indeed have this linguistic foible in its method of telling the time, but it has always struck me as potentially confusing, particularly when talking to our Teutonic allies.

In the German language, they say “halb neun”, which translates literally as “half nine”, but means not half past nine, but half an hour on the way to nine, or half past eight as we call it. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the fellow on the phone was talking to a German and when he said “half nine” he meant “half past eight”, and when he asked “Know what I mean?” he was asking for reassurance that the German chap understood that he was employing a sort of anglo-German method of telling the time?

At that moment however it suddenly occurred to me that it was an hour later in Germany, so half past nine in Berlin was half past eight in Britain, or halb neun as our continental colleagues are liable to call it.

Another thought then occurred to me that we have only recently switched back from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time, so what was half past nine BST is now half past eight GMT.

No wonder the poor fellow felt it necessary to enquire whether the other fellow might not know what he meant. There’s a one hour time difference between the UK and Germany, there’s a one hour time difference between GMT and BST and halb neun in Germany means half past eight, which is the time over here when it’s half past nine over there, or halb zehn, as they put it.

One can easily see why the Brexit negotiations are taking so long. Even if our team are simply trying to pass the time of day with their European counterparts, I think this shows how fraught and confusion-prone it can all too easily become.

If you know what I mean.