I use these all the time, my kids say "just tell me what time it is."

Old man yelling at clouds checking in. I understand the prevalence of digital, but still can't wrap my head around younger people not understanding how to read an analog clock.

Come to Germany. We still argue about how to properly say that. In some regions "quarter nine" means 8:15.

KDE for years had a clock option called "fuzzy clock" where you could set the granularity of time, either in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minute resolution. So it would just say "five to six" or whatever in words. It was designed to keep you from clock watching while working. Not sure if it exists anymore :)

I went to public school in the 80s and every classroom had a very large analog clock on the wall. Even back then, it mildly annoyed me when teachers and other adults would say "half past" and so on. It always sounded archaic to my ears, even 40+ years ago.

I also get annoyed when people say "two thousand and twenty-four" for the year. Just say "twenty twenty-four". We didn't say "one thousand nine-hundred and eighty-four" back in the day, we said "nineteen eighty-four".

Nowadays is easier just to say the precise time down to the minute.

I was thinking the other day that I never hear the phrase "bottom of the hour" (meaning __:30) anymore.

Strange, nothing has changed in my experience. It's a general way to tell the time, not exclusive to analog clocks.

Why would the use of analog or digital clocks affect that? Quarter is 1/4th of an hour = 15 minutes. I don't see the correlation and I can't confirm it from personal experience either.

Laughs in Austrian.

The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.

eg:
3:15 -> "viertel vier" = "quarter four"
3:30 -> "halb vier" ("hoiba viere" in dialekt) = "half four"
3:45 -> "dreiviertel vier" = "three quarters four"

I generally avoided use of the quarter/half shorthand because people often say it with no context.

“What time is it?”

“Half past.”

Half past what? Sort of an assumption that the asker has a clue what hour it is, but if they knew, why would they ask the time?

I’m not sad to see the phrases go.

A quarter to 1400 does sound a bit odd.

Not in Norway lol. If you want to meet up at 11:20 you say "ti på halv tolv" meaning "ten minutes before half hour before twelve.
Yeah, it took me a while to wrap my head around it too.

It does not make sense to convert digits to figure of speech, just for the fuck of it.

In Lesotho (and I assume other developing countries that teach the English standard) they use those phrases because the 24-hour day and 60-minute hours are a foreign concept to many kids and their families.

I rarely even bother using 12 hour time any more.