On the Clock

This morning on NPR's Morning Edition, I heard a commentary by Frank Deford about what he would change if he "ruled sports".   He said, in part:

I would fire all announcers in all sports who, when giving the time of a game always say, "There's two minutes and twelve seconds left on the clock."  Of course it's on the clock!  Where do you think it is, on the sundial?  When I ask you what time it is, you say, "Frank, it's quarter past eight."  You don't say, "Frank, it's quarter past eight on the clock."  Hello, dimwit announcers!  There's two minutes and twelve seconds left!  Period!

I like good rant as much as the next fellow, but Deford's got this wrong two different ways.

In the first place, there's an important distinction in meaning between "two minutes and twelve seconds left" and "two minutes and twelve seconds left on the clock".  In games where the clock starts and stops (football and  basketball, for example), the last two minutes on the clock can take much longer than two real-life minutes to play out, what with balls going out of bounds, timeouts, injuries, commercials, and so forth.  Deford is apparently "the senior writer at Sports Illustrated", so you'd think he would've noticed this at some point.

In the second place (this is the linguistics part, for those of you who've stuck it out), the claim that we don't say, "It's a quarter past eight on the clock" may be strictly true, but surely Deford has heard sentences like:

(1) I'll meet you at five.
(2) I'll meet you at five o'clock.

Hmm, what's this strange word o'clock?  The OED has this to say about its usage and origin:

(The hour of the day is expressed by a cardinal numeral, followed by a phrase which was originally  a. of the clock, now only retained in formal phraseology; shortened subsequently to  †b. of clock,  †c. a clock (see A prep.²),  d. o'clock, the current modern form; rarer obs. variants were †e. at the clock, and clock simply.)

Of the clock strikes me as pretty similar to on the clock.  Does Deford disapprove of the use of o'clock in (2)?  Given that (1) means unambiguously the same thing, o'clock is redundant in that context in a way that on the clock isn't in the sports context, but people still say it all the time.  Would he try to stamp out this pernicious usage if he ruled the world instead of merely sports?  Fortunately, we'll never find out, because he's not the boss of us.

[Now playing: "Swan Swan H" by R.E.M.]

Comments

[mike]

Is there anyone who can rant about some usage or other they don't like and not look like a blowhard? And let's count the number of times that someone's rant has changed common usage. Ready? Ok, go! Zero ... uh ...

I did like his comments about "the human factor" when discussing instant replay in MLB, tho.

[Matt]

Yeah, but if you rant long and hard enough, you can sometimes make everyone all ashamed of their common usage.

Maybe it's because he's been covering sports so long that he thinks of the phrase as silly -- after a few years of sports day in, day out, the time on the clock there is the only time that matters, so why shouldn't it be the unmarked case, without needing the "on the clock"? (Which gives us something like "There are only two minutes left, which will take about twenty minutes off the clock to play out.")

(By the way, you totally pre-commented me at DLB re Hercules' grammar.)

[The Tensor]

(By the way, you totally pre-commented me at DLB re Hercules' grammar.)

Yes!

[Will Duquette]

Seems to me DeFord is also missing the sportscaster's prime requirement: to keep up a steady flow of chatter. I'm sure there are many longer-than-necessary expressions commonly heard on sportscasts simply because they decrease the number of verbalized thoughts per minute.