Complaint #006: 12 o'clock

This is just a quick little complaint. I hope this will hold you people (wow, "you people" sounds so horrible, how about "my beloved blog readers"?) over the weekend as I probably won't have the time to post.

Enough for unnecessary introductions, I hate when people write a time for something and it is specified as 12 A.M. or 12 P.M. Which one means which? (OK, I realize PM is noon and AM is midnight, but let's look at some reasons why I shouldn't know) I was always told that at exactly midnight and exactly noon, it is actually flipped: exactly noon is AM and exactly midnight is PM (with any iota of time (such as a Planck time) past being the opposite), but upon further research (looking at Wikipedia) neither is correct. Ante meridiem (A.M.) literally means before midday and post meridiem (P.M.) means after midday. Therefore, A.M. and P.M. do not apply to noon as it is neither before or after midday. Midnight, on the other hand is both before and after midday, so both apply. From this moment forward, I should assume both 12 A.M. and 12 P.M. mean midnight of the day specified (I can use A.M. or P.M. to determine which day it applies to (e.g. 12 P.M. on Sept. 29 is 12 hours past midday on Sept 29, so most people would label that midnight of Sept. 30 (or at least midnight between Sept. 29th and 30th)))

The simple solution to this problem (other than the obvious one of expecting (or commanding) people to write 12 noon or 12 midnight, rather than 12 P.M. or 12 A.M.) is to move to the 24 hour clock. We'll still convert it in our heads (at least I know I do, even when I set my watch to 24 hour time for months), but we'll never have the issue of being confused by someone writing 12 P.M. and meaning noon (OK, no one but me is confused, but we should still do it). It's as simple as moving to the metric system and we did that so successfully in the 1970s.