Another Voice

22 November 2008

We need a new language to describe time, preferably without spatial metaphors

Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy, quit now. But I’ve been turning over in my mind a recurrent problem in human reasoning that in real life irritates and trips us all, leading to endless misunderstandings — and I may have cracked it.

It’s the problem of time zones, and putting clocks ‘forward’ and ‘back’, and whether it’s ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in Australia, and all the associated mental difficulty we encounter in putting into language clear to each other and to ourselves the way time is changed according to zone and season.

The short answer is that it isn’t. Time cannot be changed. Einstein and Relativity notwithstanding, for ordinary human purposes time — real time — doesn’t and cannot alter from one place to another. There is one time all over the globe and always has been, and we half know this and are half thinking, in this God’s-eye way, that now is now at the same time for me in England and you in Australia; and in a universal sense — in real time — nobody can be ahead of or behind anybody else.

But our human calibrations change, and we ‘move’ dates and engagements, and move through time zones, and we have never developed the language to describe this process without confusion. Because we can’t say it clearly we can’t think it clearly, and keep muddling ourselves up.

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David Short

November 21st, 2008 6:50am Report this comment

There IS a passive word for dying: being killed.

Ian G

November 22nd, 2008 12:44am Report this comment

'we have no passive verb for dying — it’s something we do rather than is done to us — and no active verb for being born'

Perhaps the absence of these verbs is itself indicative. We can turn you argument on its head, or set it the right way up(?) We have the words that describe our (religious) experience. After all, we have plenty of words that relate to an array of non-empirical concepts, which in turn, are a vital part of our lives - not least amongst them is love.

MJU

November 23rd, 2008 1:42am Report this comment

'I am dying' is continuous,not 'now'.
The present could be suicide:I die 'now' beacause I choose to.
The truth is that 'it is something done to us'by God. We have been born in time, with a specific time to live here, on earth, to live after we die for all eternity. We don't know when; we choose the 'where' in the way we live the time God has given us.
MJU

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