Pasha
Can I say " The clock says midnight" ?
Sep 19, 2019 5:22 PM
Answers · 4
1
Yes, that sounds perfectly natural.
September 19, 2019
Yes
September 20, 2019
Yes, it's correct. We often say that a clock "tells time." If you read older literature, you may need to know another usage. In the past, fifty or more years ago, some old-fashioned clocks had a chime, gong, or bell that rang on the hours. This was often true of public clocks in towers. A clock like that rings once at one o'clock, twice at two o'clock, and so on. It rings twelve times at midnight. This is called "striking" the hours. After it happens, we say "the clock struck two" or "the clock struck midnight." Each time the bell is struck is "a stroke." So, in the story of Cinderella, we read "her godmother told her to leave the ball after the clock had struck twelve," and "Cinderella ran away on the first stroke of midnight." A famous poem by the British poet T. S. Eliot refers to "...King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." The opening sentence of George Orwell's dystopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," is: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." The "horror" here is that, apparently, England has abandoned its tradition of numbering the hours from 1 to 12, and adopted the European convention of using a 24-hour system.
September 19, 2019
Yes, you can say that
September 19, 2019
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