Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-06-24 20:57:31 - Graham Ellis
When my son was young, we had a clock with animals rather than numbers around the dial at each hour, and we used to refer to times like tiger past zebra, rather than twenty past twelve. In retrospect, and in a more enlightened age, this must have been needlessly confusing - the telling of times as "animal past animal" or "animal to animal" is still something that we joke about, which goes to show just how much these things stick. It's bad enough having to teach that "4" is "twenty past" and "7" is "twenty five too", without having the beasts of the jungle coming into it.
Not my image - so I'll provide a link to similar clocks that are for sale at Hawaiian Days - and to be fair, thes clocks are very much better as they show pretty illustrations to attract one to read the clock, rather than replacing each number by an animal! Image illustraing this article - from Project Gutenberg and under the license shown on that page.
When my son was young, we had a clock with animals rather than numbers around the dial at each hour, and we used to refer to times like tiger past zebra, rather than twenty past twelve. In retrospect, and in a more enlightened age, this must have been needlessly confusing - the telling of times as "animal past animal" or "animal to animal" is still something that we joke about, which goes to show just how much these things stick. It's bad enough having to teach that "4" is "twenty past" and "7" is "twenty five too", without having the beasts of the jungle coming into it. 