Sat., 8/22 Barry C. Silk

[magus]

THEME:   none, but four triples
   
GOOD ONES:     
Positive   ABOVE ZERO [wasn't thinking math]   
Charts featuring houses   HOROSCOPES [wasn't thinking astrology]   
Nice relatives   TANTES […but we know "La plume de ma tante…"]   
   
BTW:   
French possessive   TES [but we don't know, use, or care about French "persons"]    
   
Lots of Z's and X's today!   
   
   
RATING:   
Three grins = Loved it; Two grins = Enjoyed it; One grin = A bit bland for my taste; One teardrop = Not much fun   

[Thomps2525]

The Daily News crossword includes the clue "End of time" for OCLOCK. I wonder why we say such things as "one o'clock" or "three o'clock." We don't say we weigh "175 o'scale" and we don't say the temperature is "78 o'thermometer" and we don't say a piece of lumber is "24 inches o'yardstick" so why do we use the word "o'clock" when we announce what time it is? It seems rather o'illogical.

[magus]

I suspect that town criers called out the time ("Two o'clock and all is well!")  It meant "two on the clock."  Simply calling "Two" may have felt too vague.  Of course, he might have called "Two hours" as our military does, but "o'clock" became tradition.  That time semantics does not conform to other measurements is not atypical of our "illogical" language.  For example the inflected -s is only found in the third person singular of the present tense.  Language, after all, is not mathematics.