Two Ukrainians at work having an argument and come to me to solve it.
“Deborah, does ‘a quarter of one’ mean 1:15 or 1:45?”
“It means 12:45.”
“Oh, okay.”
This is my life
Categories: Fun with Language
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Two Ukrainians at work having an argument and come to me to solve it.
“Deborah, does ‘a quarter of one’ mean 1:15 or 1:45?”
“It means 12:45.”
“Oh, okay.”
just one of those sweet wonderful things you can sit and maybe be a little smug about & then think why the hell does English make things so complicated?
Telling time in Brazil made me crazy. Even though I understood numbers, someone would have to translate time for me.
But I do love being the only English speaker in the entire department. Always these little adventures.
[…] One of the “quarter of one” guys gave me a document to edit. The document describes how a software system works. The paragraph in question describes the tables associated with setting the page size (scrolling area) in the system. When the user saves a page size [The table] PaginationDetails gives previously saved page size (if any) and if not then insert given page size and if any saved page size is there then update it with given page size. […]
That one has always bothered me, since I was a kid first learning to tell time. Argh, argh, argh. English is so weird, but I’m not articulate in anything else.