I arrived on a video call this week in the middle of a discussion about the meaning of ‘afternoon’. Sean, quite reasonably, was saying he’d always interpreted it to mean the period of the day after noon, noon being midday. Tracy, however, was saying she always regarded afternoon as the period of the day after lunch – 2pm onwards in her case.
“Where does the word ‘noon’ come from?” asked Sean. So while they were discussing the time of day, I did a quick search and discovered, to my amazement, that not only was there some validity in Tracy’s contention, she’d actually gone an hour early!
The original noon was at 3pm.
I’ll give you a minute to digest that.
It gets more complicated. The original noon was at 3pm because ‘noon’ comes from the Latin for nine. There. Chew on that. In early Christian tradition, the day began at 6am and prayers were to be said every three hours during the day, bookended by four other prayer times, including Matins (morning, pre-dawn) and Vespers (evening). The ninth hour (‘nona hora’ in Latin), therefore, was 3pm, known as the canonical hour of ‘none’.
‘None’ became ‘non’ became ‘noon’, but what this doesn’t explain is why noon crept forward from 3pm to midday. One theory is that time in medieval England was vague. The only timekeeping devices were sundials and water clocks, which, while remarkably clever, didn’t fit comfortably on the wrist.
So by the time of King Richard, if you said, “We’re going on a crusade. Meet you at noon,” you could be standing around waiting for several hours while your fellow marauders picked any time they fancied between midday and three. This left you vulnerable to ambush from the likes of Robin Hood, for whom time was merely a human construct, rather than an absolute reality, thus giving him the edge in matters of punctuality.
When the first mechanical clocks with faces appeared in the 14th century, people noticed that the number 12 always seemed to be at the top, coinciding with when the sun was at its highest. Having forgotten that ‘noon’ was supposed to mean ‘nine’, they decided it would be a good name for this high hour, and thus the term ‘high noon’ came into being. There is no low noon.
Life must have become a lot more efficient for medieval kings and queens, leaving them with more spare time. Which probably explains the 100 Years War. But as always happens, the more we obsess about time, the less of it we seem to have, and so in 1453 the English surrendered Bordeaux and returned home to focus on their Christmas shopping.
As should I. Have a good one.
