Another Voice

22 November 2008

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

If the clock goes ‘back’ then sunrise, noon and sunset are advanced. If Sydney time is 11 hours ‘ahead’ of our English time, then their dawns and dusks are ‘advanced’ relative to ours. They’ve already happened. But words like ‘ahead’ and ‘advance’ have deep connotations in our minds with earliness or promptitude; so unconsciously we are fighting the instinctive idea that if the sun has already risen (or set) in Sydney, then they have (sort of) got there first; their birds have caught their worms before ours; they are ‘earlier’ than us. But in fact what it means to say Sydney is ‘ahead’ of us is that it is later in their local time than in ours. Time-zone time makes it ‘later’ in the place where the day has (in real time) broken earlier. But not in the sense of Sydney clocks showing an earlier time than ours, for they show a later one.

Enough. We could do with a new language of time: one which uses different terms for real time (time as a dimension) and zonal calibrations of the localised day. And probably one which avoids spatial metaphor altogether.

But your brain must be close to boiling, so I’ll stop — before I get going on my next theory, which is that our curious inability to accept that we will not exist after we die (though we have no trouble in accepting that we did not exist before we were born) may result from nothing more than that 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. If we borned (sic), people might ask what we did before that.

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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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