Okay, so some schools in Great Britain are removing analog clocks from classrooms because kids don’t know how to read them. How about, I don’t know, teaching them how to read them?
Especially since they happen to be in buildings full of people specially trained to teach things.
Comics I Don't Understand 
My high school did have analog-display clocks with traditional face and hands, but with an elaborate system to keep all the classrooms synchronized, with each other and with the bells. I say analog, but even though not digital they were in a sense quantized. The minute hand was generally stationary, but every 60 seconds would do a ker-chunk backwards a fraction (like cocking something) then ahead to the next minute mark on the dial.
These advances were controlled from the office, and when the system got wrong somehow there would be a fury of clocks all over the place being clicked forward into the right time.
My 10th grade homeroom was in the Chorus practice room stuck onto the side of the auditorium, and it had been left out of the clock plan. They mounted an ordinary electric wall clock, with a sweep second hand, which was an object of fascination when we were feeling impatient. However, the schoolwide bells were still heard there, so we didn’t really get any leverage from our independent clock.
Each school is going to get students coming in and out each year, so if they want all the students to be able to read the analog clocks, they’re going to have to spend time each year reteaching this. And as the article points out, they want the students to be comfortable quickly telling the time during tests. Why not just give the time in a format that’s easy for the students?
The main argument for insisting on a format difficult for the students would be to claim that reading an analog clock is an important life skill. Except, I suspect that it’s actually not. My son was much better at reading an analog clock when he was 4, than he is now, at 8, because he’s had so little reason to use that skill.
Learning to read analog time is important for learning the clock
face. How else do you explain clockwise and counterclockwise?
Are you going to go to degrees (or radians) rather than say
you’re talking about the car in the 10 O’clock position?
It’s possible these terms will go away or become unstuck from
their histories. I don’t think that time is yet, though that may
be just because I’m a geezer.
It’s because Metric. Commies.
Velcro is easier than shoelaces, but we still expect people to be able to tie knots. As Arthur says, there are side benefits to knowing how to read a clock face.
The German rail network has a nationwide network of analog clocks, similar to what Mitch4 described @1: the second hand does a complete sweep in about 58 seconds, after which it waits for the synchronization pulse from the central system, which both advances the minute hand and releases the second hand for another 58-second sweep.
What they’re actually talking about isn’t taking clocks out of classrooms. They’re talking about taking clocks out of exam rooms, which are in schools, but serve people who went to other schools.
This would be similar to having no analog clocks in the rooms where they give the SAT. Yes, there’s a considerable amount of overlap between “students taking the exam” and “students who attend this school”, but they’re really different groups. Asking “why don’t they just teach the kids how to read the clocks”, the answer is “because it’s not what they do, and it’s not what they’re there for.”
This would be like, if somebody noticed that some kids were nervous about parallel parking when testing for their driving license, asking “well, why doesn’t the driving instructor just show the kid(s) how to parallel park?” Or another analogy might be manual v automatic transmission on the driving exam. I haven’t shifted my own gears in decades. I don’t have to, and I don’t see a need to (re)develop the skill. Reading an analog clock is similar… the timepieces used by young people today (cell phones) can display time digitally.
Arthur says:
It’s a staple now of tv dialog that On your six! is a warning of There’s someone coming up right behind you!. And Buddy, I’ve got your six means I’ll back you up. And it’s hardly ever a fuil six o’clock.
Maybe this will help get people to use the unambiguous 24 hour clock.
I once saw a really neat watch that was numbered from 13 to 24 (instead of 1 to 12).
Frankly. it’s not all that useful anymore. Not only are most clocks digital, every one of those students has one with him.
If it has a use, let the parents teach it.
We old geezers have to deal with the fact that some of the stuff we learned is falling by the wayside. I feel the same way about cursive.
There is a value to being able to write cursive, to read an analog clock, to build a campfire, to know how to use log tables. The question is whether the value is high enough to justify spending limited resources on teaching it.
I would happily have the next generation be unable to read cursive and analog clocks, if they were trained in detecting BS in commercial and political speech, instead. That is a skill that is more critical for a democracy to teach.
As far as clockwise and counterclockwise go — the directions aren’t going away, and the terms aren’t going away. But, for myself, I don’t ask myself whether I fasten things by turning them clockwise or counterclockwise; I tell myself “righty tighty lefty loosey.”
As far as knowing directions based on clock faces — that’s just based on taking a circle and dividing by 30. If there’s something at my 3, it’s at 90 degrees to me.
I would have thought analogue clocks were useful in an exam situation in that if you have three essays to write in 2 hours, you can easily see the chunks of 40 minutes for each taking up 2/3 of a clockface. Easier than bringing that to mind virtually. But then, I am getting on a bit.
I foresee the triumphant return of widdershins and deosil… ;-)
analogue clocks are easier to read out of the corner of your eye, because you just have to see the shape, not read each number
Schools will never be all that invested in teaching the detection of BS in commercial and political speech, because that also confers the detection of BS in teacher and (particularly) school administrator speech.
I don’t know about that, Dave. My daughter’s school had a whole section on propaganda and it’s use in advertising and politics. I thought it was pretty cool that they were teaching them the very important skill of BS detecting.
The engineer who helped me build my first computer, lo these many decades ago, had a soft logic clock on his monitor, which told him “It’s almost quarter to five.” I consider it a life skill, along with cursive and shoe laces and manual transmissions. When you need it you need it, and don’t want to be thought a fool for not having it. You never know.
I have to admit that there are capital cursive letters that I don’t remember anymore.
I can still use a slide rule for multiplication, though.
I agree with narmitaj. I can read an analog clock much faster than a digital one. If I have to leave at a certain time, I can glance at an analog clock and know how much time I have, while looking at a digital clock requires some thought and maybe math. But I’m old, too. And I can multiply with a slide rule, too, Winter.
James, according to this badly-written article, the test-taking aspect is just one person’s speculation.
I had an incident last year when a 20-something hotel desk clerk was struggling to give me waling directions to something and I said “Oh, you mean I walk clockwise around {whatever the landmark was]”
She looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues, and I explained the concept of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise,” which she said might be very useful if everybody else understood what it meant. I really didn’t know how to respond to that.
And this was a young lady who KNEW how analog clocks worked.
I switched to cursive with printed capitals in high school. A few years into college, I changed again to all printing. My notes were much more readable. I’ve kept that, other than signature, although these days I write so little that it’s a bit tough when I do.
I never really learned how to tell time by looking at the sun. That’s a skill that a lot of people older than me have. And it’s probably not that difficult to learn. You don’t even have to know which direction is north.
In a related incident, I once tried to make it easier on a young cashier by giving her $8.37 for a $7.82 pizza. Out came the calculator (this was post-Katrina, power was out).
A few years ago I tried to give a cashier (using your example because I certainly don’t remember the specifics) $8.82 for a $7.82 purchase. The girl had no idea how to deal with it.
BoT – I am at a loss as to how anything in your transaction is easier for anyone. Back in the day, I worked the register at a 7/Eleven type store, and making change for “expected” amounts becomes second nature, having to figure arbitrary values in order to reduce the number of coins involved is way more trouble than it is worth. And in your particular example, it’s just bizarre. You hand the clerk bills and a quarter, dime and two pennies; she returns your quarter along with another quarter and nickel, then puts the dime and pennies in the register. You have handled 7 coins, one of which just bounces back and forth, and she has dealt with 7 coins, (or 5 if she just leaves your quarter on the counter for you.) If you had just given her the bills, she’d easily calculate the 18 cents change (second nature), and given you a dime, nickel and three pennies from the register; both of you handling 5 coins. Now, if you had given her $8.02, that might have made more sense. She would have still blinked and had to do some extra figgerin’ (although this almost falls into the “expected” amount category), but you’re down to just 4 coins each.
And Bill, if you’re saying the cashier didn’t have the presence of mind to say “here, you gave me a dollar too much.” while returning a one, then yeah, that’s kinda sad. But s/he could have been going through a thought process along the lines of: “The idiot doesn’t realize he gave me a dollar too much. Or did he? I’d better check the ticket to make sure. Nope, he overpaid by a dollar. Do I return it, pocket it? Maybe it’s a set up, I’d better return it. Then again, if he can’t keep better track of his money, I sure can. etc., etc., etc…”
Guero, maybe CIDU Bill gave four two-dollar bills ;)
Yeah, Guero, the amounts were from over 10 years ago, so like CIDU Bill I don’t remember the exact amounts in question. Probably should have mentioned that before making you write paragraphs. Those particular ones don’t make sense of course, since I would’ve gotten back a quarter I just gave her.
It would have indeed made it easier on her had she been able to manipulate a number or two in her head. I was trying to save her from giving me a bunch of pennies, but just gobsmacked her instead.
“Guero, maybe CIDU Bill gave four two-dollar bills” — also a bad idea, since every so often I see a story about some business refusing to accept a two-dollar bill because “it has to be a counterfeit, there are no such things as two-dollar bills in this country, stop trying to pretend with this play money or we’re calling the cops.”
Ok, we’ve established the amounts in question are not practical real world amounts, and maybe using real world practical amounts would obviate the following comment, but…
1) I am bad at arithmetic — slow, because I’m jumping through various different ways of handling the problem, because the way I was taught is not the way my brain naturally see numbers, and so I usually apply one method half-assedly, and get into trouble
2) So with BoT’s example, I see no good way to do it, other than to a) figure out the correct change expected (18¢), then add that to the amount given (37¢ + 18¢ = 55¢), and then figure out how to give that amount in coins (11 nickels? 5 dimes and a nickel? 55 pennies?) Doing the subtraction and addition in my head is just hard, I lose track of the numbers, because the system I was taught in school is a written system, so I picture writing it down, and I quickly lose track of the numbers written. Especially under pressure of someone watching me, I am very likely to fluff one or more parts of the calculations. So BoT is basically taunting me that BoT is better at mental arithmetic than I am. OK, I am a cashier in this example, so I guess one would hope after a while I’d learn better math techniques on the fly… The few times I have worked as a volunteer cashier have been about as awful as I have imagined, with me making boneheaded mistakes. Maybe had I kept at it I would have learned to compensate. I rarely attempt the clever change reducing payment method, because I’m much more likely to screw it up than not, and even if I don’t, I don’t have the assuredness to insist on my way when faced with a doubtful cashier…
3) Bill’s example doesn’t require (or shouldn’t require) arithmetic, but maybe what’s obvious to me isn’t obvious to all, as BoT’s example might be obvious to Bot, but not to me… But, as guero points out, the numbers chosen are silly, and result in other considerations (and in fact are the kind of stupid thing I might do, and I think actually have… “Dude, why’d you hand me an extra dollar?)
I foresee the triumphant return of widdershins and deosil
There is a comic series, on Gocomics and maybe elsewhere, called “Widdershins”.
Once in a long while with cash transactions I have used that technique to reduce the pieces in the change. But usually it has helped to say “Here, with this you can just make my change a solid $10 please.” Even though they will still need to sort my coins, that would be less complicated than pulling out the singles and load of coins.
Mark in Boston — telling time by the sun is not all that hard, if you don’t need to be more accurate than, say, half an hour or so. Except that it only tells you local time, and you have to remember how to adjust that for where in your time zone you are, DST, and suchlike. Also, knowing where south is is pretty useful, especially as you get further from the equator, and as you get further toward winter.
I’d put it at harder than reading an analog clock, easier than driving a manual transmission.
guero: Why was it trouble to deal with change for arbitrary, “unexpected” amounts? Don’t you just enter it in the register, and give back whatever change the register says, without doing any math? There’s one or two less buttons to hit for $8.00, instead of $8.37, but it doesn’t seem like there’s more math.
(In the specific examples of $8.37 for $7.82, or $8.82 for $7.82, the cashier may get confused because the oddity of the amounts may lead them to suspect that one of the parties has made a counting mistake. But as others have said, let’s just assume the numbers make sense.)
Of course, this requires the cashier to be convinced you’re correct.
WW, the problem comes when the cashier has to do the math in their head. Obviously, the example we’ve been discussing above is not the best, but I’ve been known to give 20.07 for a bill that is 14.57 or even for 14.32, so I get even quarters back. Invariably, this causes the cashier to look at me oddly, and sometimes, they enter in the 20 into the register without realizing I’m giving them change, too, and then they have to do the math manually and it blows their minds. I’ve had them hand me back the one when I give them 21.07 for a bill that’s 16.07, because they don’t see that I want a $5 bill back.
Then every once in a great while, I run into someone who actually knows how to count back change and they don’t usually have issues (and sometimes even thank me for helping them conserve their penny supply). But counting back change is a skill that’s not really taught anymore, or if it is, it’s in elementary school and no one remembers by the time they get their first job.
Wendy: guero referred to the unusual amounts being troublesome when working the register, so presumably he/she didn’t have to do the math in their head.
I do know the method to do change where you count up from the price to the amount given; maybe it’s just the odd example given, but I don’t think that method works too well when you give extra amounts hoping to make the change be nice and round and even, because it forces you to do (harder) math, ie: more likely having to carry digits and remember that you did. So for $8.37 given for $7.82, the highest money piece you can add not going over is a quarter (assuming you don’t have 50¢ pieces), so 82 + 25, so 2 + 5 that’s 7 (and nothing to carry), 8+2 is 10, so that’s what? 0? carry the 1? Where? Oh, OK, so it’s like $8, and what was the change? 7? I hope so.. so…I’m at $8.07 OK. Add another quarter. Uh, 5 + 7, that’s 12, so, uh, 2, carry the 1, 2 + 0 is 2, plus the 1 I’m carrying, so 3, now what was the ones digit again? 2, so uh, 32. I need to get to … 37? — oh, hey, that’s only five! A nickel and I’m done. Yay!
It’s easier to count up to “round” “even” dollar amounts, and you quickly learn the sub sums to get there. Count up to 37 is unexpected, unusual, and I maintain leaves room for me to make errors forgetting to carry or losing track of the numbers because I have to do them backwards with the algorithm I learned in school.
Are there better algorithms? Probably? Why don’t they teach them to cashiers? I don’t know.
I remember the old days at Aldi in Germany, where not only did the cashiers have your change calculated and out for you before you could even register what the total was (and THAT makes it REALLY intimidating if you’re trying to reduce your pocket change!), but they had to actually memorize a three digit code for every item in the store and be able to punch it in quickly (before bar code, yes!). I was always in awe of them.
Winter Wallaby – I did say “back in the day”. Registers then were basically glorified adding machines that added up prices as you manually entered them in via big mechanical buttons. It was up to you to figure change. Hell, the prices were even stamped on the individual items, bar codes were a twinkle in IBM’s beady little blue eyes. Well, actually they had probably already been invented, but were certainly not in common use yet.
And Mitch4, you hit on the crux of the matter – the cashier has to handle the coins, no matter if they come from the customer or go back to the customer, so the only favor you’re doing is to yourself, reducing the change in your pocket. And reading back over this, it comes across as somewhat bitter. Believe me, it’s not. If the customer wanted to play, I was more than happy to oblige, just to break up the monotony. It just helped if they cued you in first, like you suggested.
This was nothing compared to my other job in a pool hall. Not only did I have to handle making change, the rates were based on the amount of time played. I punched a time clock when the players started, and punched it again when they quit, then mentally calculated the number of minutes played. (Do they even make calculators that can do that today?). The first 15 minutes was a quarter, and then it was a penny a minute thereafter. This was per player, so it was loads of fun when players on a table started or finished at different times, (the “time cards” were by table, rather than individual.). I might add, that even if there were a specialized calculator available at the time, after a couple of months, it would have been quicker to do it mentally, than take the effort of keying the times into it.
Well fudge. I just wrote a delightfully witty and somewhat lengthy reply, submitted it, and it disappeared. It doesn’t even say it is awaiting Bill’s blessing.
Oh well, tl;ydgtr version:
Winter wallaby – “Back in the day” cash registers just added up the ticket, the cashier did the mental calculations for change.
Mitch4 – You hit the crux of the matter, the cashier has to handle the coins whether they come from the customer, or go back to the customer. There is no real benefit one way or the other, except for the mental gymnastics. That and you got rid of some pennies. ;-)
For those of you who are annoyed that counting back change isn’t being taught any more, you will be pleased to know that it is now back, and indeed is the basis of how addition and subtraction is taught under modern Common Core methods.
For what it’s worth — when I was a cashier at the convenience store down the street, as often as not, I’d just ring in the total as “exact”, and count out the change manually. It’s just as easy, and it doesn’t mess up the till. You type in that the customer handed you $18.23, or that they handed you 118.53 and you gave them back $100.30, your till is the same at the end of the night.
“you have to remember how to adjust that for where in your time zone you are, DST, and suchlike.”
Plus the fact that it changes from day to day.
guero: Rest assured that I’m imagining the deleted comment as one of the most wittiest, enthralling comments ever to grace the internet. Well done!
You don’t have to do much math to give change out of 8.37 for 7.82. The fast way to make change is to count up.
Nickel: 7.87
Dime: 7.97
Dime: 8.07
Dime: 8.17
Dime: 8.27
Dime: 8.37
Done!
Great! I’ll just count out pennies till I get there: I’ll be the greatest cashier ever, no math required!
MiB, that still is doing math, and it’s alarming how many people are incapable of it. Including grasping that you start out with a nickel to go from $7.82 to $7.87.
I was in a store once as a kid, and I handed over 10 bucks for something that cost $8.80. I got back two dimes and a ten dollar bill.
I ran.
I’m 50, and I can read an analog clock – but it takes reading (not quite to the level of “the big hand is on the…” but in that neighborhood). If I glance at a digital clock, it tells me when now is (especially since my digital clocks are in 24-hour time, all the ones that can handle it). So the analog advantage depends on who’s reading which clock.
On the other hand, I was working at a casino for a while, and I remember a conversation between a colleague of mine on the next table and our supervisor. The colleague wanted to take a break a little early, at 7:30; the supervisor said he could take it at quarter to 8. Long, involved argument (not helped by him having to focus on the table every couple minutes), which consisted entirely of colleague saying “but I want to break _before_ 8!” and supervisor repeating that he could go at quarter to. Neither of them could think in the other’s language – I believe I finally interjected that quarter to 8 was 7:45 and they both said “Ohhh…”. I can use both languages…which is apparently a rare skill (at least in that context).
And I agree that reading an analog clock is becoming an archaic skill, on a par with starting a fire without matches (which I can do, but not easily). Cool but not necessary today. Language will survive without the references (dial a phone?), or it won’t because it’s not needed.
I’d love it if widdershins and deosil came back, but I’d have to work on it to remember which one is which!
I should say – I have great difficulty with righty tighty and so on, because my brain refuses to keep track of left and right. This Catholic girl has to think about crossing myself to make my right hand twitch to figure out which one it is (to figure out on which side the fork goes, what to tell someone when I’m navigating in the car or walking…). So learning widdershins and deosil would only be a slight extra effort.
I won’t ask why a quarter is 25 cents but a quarter to is 15 minutes. I’ll just sit here singing “Quarter to Three” by Gary U.S. Bonds.
For those who have driven right-hand-drive cars … How are the pedals organized? Same as on american cars, or flipped? Which foot do you use for the accelerator, say?
Same question for the hand controls. Obviously a shifter not on the steering column will be to the driver’s left; but with a manual transmission is the location of gears like here or flipped? What about if it’s on the steering column, which hand uses it? And how about the turn signals (U.S. right), main lights (U.S. left), and wipers / washers?
Thanks!
P.S. Who says fiction feature movies aren’t educational. It was from “Sweetie” that I learned Australia drives on the left.
@ Mitch4 – The arrangements for the pedals is always identical (gas=right, brake=middle, clutch=left). The gears are also always in the same order (counting up from 1st in the upper left corner). Some manufacturers put reverse in oddball places, but that can happen with “normal” cars, too.
It is rather difficult to get used to changing gears with the left hand. At the beginning, my wife and I would occasionally ask each other to shift a gear (from the passenger seat on the left). There’s also the problem of the automatic reaction to extend the right hand, which immediately (and painfully) collides with the door. Ouch.
Turn signals and windshield washers are not always consistent, our rental car in New Zealand had them reversed(*), but I was told that other manufacturers use the “normal” US arrangement. The funniest thing was that on at least two occasions (on bright, sunny days), native drivers understood my activated windshield wipers as an acceptable indication that I wanted to turn right.
Pedals are the same; shift patterns I think are the same, but I can’t remember; windshield wipers/blinkers were the bane of my existence, as I always wiped the windshield to indicate a turn…
So, what I remember as giving me difficulty: turn signal, and how the ^#%@! to enter a round-about; things that didn’t give me a problem: the pedals, and shifting (so whichever it is, it felt natural — is that mirror image pattern or the same, I can’t remember, but it worked fine…)
I think I got so flustered with the turn signal stalk not being where I wanted it to be that even when I did get the right stick, I had to think about which way to flip it to signal the turn I wanted to make, and half the time I got that wrong. It was so wrong to me, that not only couldn’t I remember which lever it was, I also lost the natural feel for which way the lever works…
“I won’t ask why a quarter is 25 cents but a quarter to is 15 minutes. ”
Is that serious? An hour has 60 minutes, so 60/4 == 15. A dollar has 100 cents . . . .
jjmcgaffey – Don’t feel bad. I have a “beauty mark” – aka a mole – on my right shoulder. I learned to tell right from left with it and lately I sometimes have to refer to it again.
I also have trouble with righty tighty, lefty loosey as for some reason I am looking at the turn from the opposite side and if I follow same it goes backwards – I actually have to remember clockwise and counter clockwise.
Mark from Boston – because a quarter is 1/4 of anything.
In the “olden days” coins used to be worth their weight in whatever metal they were made of. For example a pound sterling (which did not weigh an actual pound) was worth the weight of silver in the coin. A shilling was worth the amount of silver in it as was the Spanish silver dollar. When one used the coin if one was making a purchase the coin would be weighed to make sure that nothing had been shaved off of it. (Milling was added to edges of coins to help prevent cheating someone by shaving silver off the edge as such would be obvious.)
So when one made a purchase the coin would be weighed for the correct weight. If one was not spending the entire coin, the coin would be cut – in half for a half pound, shilling, Spanish dollar, thater, Louis, etc., in fourths or quarters,or eight bits. (So that is why 2 bits make a quarter and a Spanish dollar was a piece of eight.) So a quarter of a coin would physically be 1/4 of any coin. Later when the money was worth what the government said it was instead of the value of the metal in it, a quarter remained 1/4 the value of a dollar.
Kilby- what normal setup for windshield wipers (washers)? We have 3 vehicles – all from the same brand – and none of them have the controls for the windshield wipers and washers.
Thanks for the right-hand-drive comments. The clich’e is the American (or Continental) having trouble staying on the left, but it only recently occurred to me to wonder if the sheer operation of the car might be as much of a hurdle.
Meryl, was there genuinely a “hay foot, straw foot” memory aid for country recruits, in Revolutionary times say?
@ Mitch4 – It was for exactly that reason that on our first UK vacation, we booked a ferry across the North Sea, so that we could get used to driving on the left while in a familiar vehicle. The advantages are obvious, but the disadvantages were serious enough that we never did it that way again. With the steering wheel on the “wrong” side, passing on the freeway was difficult, and it also made it easy to “forget” and land in the wrong lane (or side) after making left or right turns.
After two subsequent vacations with “left side driving” (both punctuated by regular incidents of “bang the right hand on the door” (because the stick shift wasn’t there), we decided to reserve an automatic transmission on our third such vacation.
As far as left and right goes: left and port both have four letters, so I just imagine that I’m facing the fore of the boat, and then the side that is port is left.
… yeah, I know port and starboard better than I know left and right. It’s because I learned to sail on the Charles River back before it was all that clean, and if you screwed up port and starboard, you were likely to fall into a rather nasty situation.
Also, when I was sixteen, I cut my hand badly and have a huge L-shaped scar on my left hand; that helps, too.
I did basic training when I was 19. You start marching by stepping off with the left foot. You will occasionally make turns, and you do NOT want to be the person who draws the attention of the drill sergeant by facing the wrong way, or starting off out-of-step with the rest of the flight.
It goes like this:
drill sergeant: Where are you from
unfortunate recruit: (wherever)
sergeant: Well, when you’re in (wherever), left can be that way, but when you are HERE, left means military left, which is THIS way.
(pushups follow)
(On “righty tighty” …) Let’s see if I can say this clearly without getting verbose. There are circumstances — such as working on a part that is “around on the other side” of something you are facing — where to loosen the part (if it is conventionally threaded) you need to turn it clockwise from your immediate standpiint. And later when you reconnect it, to tighten it you need to turn it counterclockwise from your immediate standpoiint
Mitch4 @ 16: That’s why I use a different method I had been
taught (though it requires knowing which is your right hand).
Hold your right hand in a loose fist with the thumb sticking
out. To move in the direction the thumb points, turn in the
direction your fingers point.
MItch4 – well, it depends – not in a fancy carriage, but in a wagon perhaps.
Thank you for giving me an opening – a bit late – but on the episode of Elementary that was shown tonight (5/14) called “Pushing Buttons” there is a reenactment at the start. No, don’t get excited – Robert and I were not in it. Our unit cannon and a number of the fellows from our unit were in it. (This is the cannon that I have fired in the past when the crew was short.) Our fellows are firing the unit and are in the light beige “hunting frocks” not uniforms. They did not want women (although one of the people in uniform seems to be one) and we would have to have to have been there much too early for us.
What is interesting is that one can see what appears to Manhattan over the trees – this was filmed at a restoration village on the Nassau/Suffolk county line where no such view of Manhattan exists.
I am sure it will be on free per view and rerun.
My problem with English cars was that everything was flipped for my hands and nothing for my feet: so I accelerated when I wanted to shift because my brain didn’t want to work out half-flips.
Thanks, Meryl. I’m somewhat losing track of what is meant in response to what else, but the thing I was referencing about “hay foot, straw foot” was probably about marching (not driving wagons or carriages).
I don’t remember where I ran across it; perhaps in reading “Johnny Tremaine” but I would hope in more sources.
The idea was just that kids fresh off the farm might never have learned left and right, so couldn’t learn to march with commands using those terms. A solution (or workaround) somewhere was to bind some hay around one boot and straw around the other, and refer to “hay foot, straw foot” as needed.
Meryl, I totally get the beauty mark thing: when I was 3 or 4, for some reason we were discussing right and left as we were driving past the local reservoir, and that stuck in my head: right is where the reservoir is.
I guess it’s a good thing we were driving clockwise rather than counter-clockwise.
As a kid, I memorized the direction that worked when opening a jar, and for years afterwards, I soemtimes called up that memory when I was trying to loosen or tighten screws (especially when they were in an odd position). I wish I had I learned the right hand curled fingers and thumb trick (see Arthur @17) much earlier than in a high school or college physics class, it would have saved me from countless mental mayonnaise reflections.
Mitch 4 – I took it as joke about the foot for the clutch and the foot for the other pedals in a car. I have never heard of the other use – I will ask when I get a chance around our unit to see – everyone knows different things (in addition to what everyone in the unit knows).
Unfortunately Johnnie Tremain is the not the most accurate work of fiction.
Since my mind wanders – the idea of the straw food and hay foot as I thought it was intended, made me think of a show on PBS called “Upstart Crow” which is a comedy series about William Shakespeare. It is not intended to be historically accurate. One of the running jokes is a woman who wants to act and play women who is told that women cannot do the “high squeaky” voice that is needed to play a woman and then the question asked of her is “Where would you put the half coconuts?” When he travels between Avon and London he talks about about it like a commute – “There were chickens on the tracks.” Each episode is based around one of his plays and what happens to/around him in the episode is basically the plot of a play. (So the idea of step on the hay with the hay food would match up as an idea of going along with commuting.) I find them very funny.
Bill – unfortunately I sometimes now need to check my arms again to see which is left and which is right.
I had not heard of righty tighty, lefty loosey until maybe 10 years ago. I actually find it confusing. Because when one is turning (for example) a lid – one side of the lid is turning in left and one side is turning right. If one turns a lid clockwise – the further side is turning to the right, while the closer side is turning to the left. So clockwise and counterclockwise make more sense to me.