Time and place

[AskingQuestionsAllTheTime]

Something I have noticed more and more often in the past year or so is people on the radio saying, in effect, "this was/is a time where" instead of "this was/is a time when".

"The Middles Ages was where the church was still important." "The minute where you realise you are on the wrong train."

It doesn't seem to happen the other way round, with "when" being used instead of "where".

Why is this thought to be right, and how on earth did it get started?

I’ve heard that being said too. I suppose people think if you can be on a train, you can be ‘there’ and so you can use ‘where.’

‘I was there on the train and that’s the minute where I realised I was on the wrong train.’

Oh I haven’t actually heard it much though. I’ve seen it on social media, things like ‘that moment where...’

I remember reading in Pinker's book "The Language Instinct" (highly recommended) that the human brain is strong on spatial processing and our language affects that. So we use the metaphors of space for other things: "a LONG time ago", "looking FORWARD", "in the FAR future", or the idea of TRAVELLING BACK in time.

So perhaps it's no surprise that historians particularly conceptualise the past as something like a landscape.

But a minute, a time, is not a place; that is why it puzzles me. The train is the where that you realised it, and the minute is the when.

That was why the title of the book Midnight Is A Place caught at my mind back in the 1970s: because it didn't make sense, so there must be an explanation in the book and I wanted to know what it was. (There is.)

DDD, as in "the past is another country", you mean? I suppose; but that doesn't really explain why all of a sudden World Service and R4 presenters have started to say "where" instead of "when" about such things as events in a cricket match -- "that was the moment where the match was lost", for instance, or "the moment where he missed the shot at goal". It's not as if that were a continuum in the way that a long time ago or travelling in time are.

Actually, far and distant and such words are not necessarily spatial, are they? Long applies to both time and space: "I was on the long road for a long time" and "long ago and far away" and "the time for that is long gone". I don't think it is quite that simple.

Yes, I'm not saying spatial thinking justifies the phenomenon you are describing, I just think it's an interesting idea. Actually, the fact that we see "long" and "far" as describing both space and time just shows how spatial we are: we use the concept of length and distance (which surely is what "far" refers to) to apply to both space and time.

I think Pinker also points out that we are also very visual, and visual metaphors arise all the time in our language (eg "I SEE what you mean"), so I think many of us visualise time as an object with physical dimensions (eg I picture the weeks, months, years laid out in a line).

Subverting linear time is what some science fiction is about, isn't it. Time turns on a wheel, time is all simultaneous, time splits constantly to give us infinite alternative worlds, and so on.

www.etymonline.com/word/long is interesting on the origins of "long" looks as if it were both duration and distance from early on in its use. Extent can be either, after all, and be abstract too to a greater or lesser extent!

(Which is more fun than the strange and I think novel phenomenon that caused me to start this thread.)

It is starting to look as if time simply confuses the BBC. This morning one of their news-programme commentators said, "There's been no carnival in Brazil next February."

eeep?