> On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:19, Clive D.W. Feather <cl...@davros.org> wrote: > > Tony Finch said: >>> "minutes" and "seconds" are fractions of 60 and have been so since >>> babylonian times for minutes and since 13-mumble for seconds. >> >> The etymology is actually helpful in this case rather than misleading as >> etymologies so often are. >> >> "minute" is short for "pars minuta prima", the first small part >> "second" is short for "pars minuta secunda", the second small part > > And I've seen "third" and "fourth", with the obvious meaning, used in old > documents. > > But etymology doesn't override present meanings.
It isn't really a question of what present meanings are, but of whether they are a good idea or not. If the hectosecond were redefined to sometimes be 99 or 101 seconds, with a table lookup required to find out which kind you were in, I wouldn't think that was a good idea even if it did fix a problem someone was having. In some ways the UTC minute redefinition is even worse than that. A 6 year old might not know how many seconds are in a hectosecond but would often be expected to know there are 60 seconds in a minute. Redefining this to be otherwise seems bound to cause cognitive dissonance in many grown up former 6 year olds. Dennis Ferguson _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs