{"id":3117,"date":"2005-09-10T10:10:12","date_gmt":"2005-09-10T17:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/09\/10\/3117.html"},"modified":"2005-09-10T10:10:12","modified_gmt":"2005-09-10T17:10:12","slug":"pet-peeve-minute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/09\/10\/pet-peeve-minute\/","title":{"rendered":"Pet peeve: &#8220;minute&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This is a really minor thing, but I just saw it again in a published story, so I figured I might as well try to recruit y'all in the campaign to stamp it out.<\/p>\n<p>In both published and unpublished fiction, I fairly often see lines like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>We fell silent.  A few minutes later, she said, \"Sure, why not.\"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Or:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I handed the cashier my money.  A minute later, he handed me my change.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Most brief interactions between people take place on a scale of seconds, not minutes.  A minute is a fairly long time to (for example) sit silently with someone in the middle of a conversation.  A few minutes is a much longer time.<\/p>\n<p>Authors often like to use phrases like <span class=\"word-as-word\">a few minutes<\/span> to mean \"a short while.\"  In many contexts, that makes perfect sense; in fact, one of the dictionary definitions of <span class=\"word-as-word\">minute<\/span> is \"a short space of time: MOMENT.\"  If you say \"just a minute,\" you don't mean \"please wait exactly 60 seconds.\"  If you say \"it took us a few minutes to get ready\" when it actually took under a minute, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.<\/p>\n<p>But when I'm reading fiction in a reasonably formal narrative voice, about an interaction taking place in realtime between two ordinary humans, it's a lot harder for me not to read <span class=\"word-as-word\">minute<\/span> as literally referring to a period of about 60 seconds.<\/p>\n<p>This may just be another example of Jed's unfortunate penchant for literalism.  But it does irritate me, and it's really easy to fix; just substitute <span class=\"word-as-word\">moments<\/span> or <span class=\"word-as-word\">seconds<\/span> for <span class=\"word-as-word\">minutes<\/span>.  That's clearer and more accurate and generally doesn't hurt anything.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a really minor thing, but I just saw it again in a published story, so I figured I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}