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Why UTC is used as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time
- djhaskin987 7y agoSorta like this comic: https://xkcd.com/1923/ https://xkcd.com/1923/ Replace "Fahrenheit" and "Celsius" with "English" and "French" and that's basically what we have here. We took the average of the two (CUT vs TUC).
- hiasen 7y agoIt is the same reason as why the International Organization for Standardization is abbreviated ISO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization#Name_and_abbreviations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
- ThePadawan 7y agoVery Baader-Meinhof! I think I heard about this in a recent Only Connect or QI episode (?). I wonder what the overlap of viewers is between those shows and HN.
- blattimwind 7y agoIn German "Internationale Standardisierungs-Organisation" could've been chosen to fit ISO, but they went with "Internationale Organisation für Normung" instead.
- LeonidasXIV 7y agoExcept that that hyphen does not make much sense here, if you wanted to write it you'd pick Standardisierungsorganisation instead which gives you a very long word and matching that to ISO is just odd. In official government speech words don't tend to get that long, instead they get split into multiple ("Bundesministerium der Finanzen" instead of "Bundesfinanzministerium").
- blattimwind 7y agoThat and abbreviations in German were generally not initialisms. It'd be InterStanOrg or something weird like that.
- mfer 7y agoAn international body (which included multiple organizations) who didn't want to favor any particular language. We could use more work and thinking like that these days.
- Hamuko 7y agoExcept it still favours languages that use the same initial letters for universal, time and coordinated. Don't know why it's such a big deal to favour one language for an abbreviation and let others just deal with it. We dirty foreigners also have FM radios, hailing from the country of US(A) in the year 2019 AD (the era that follows BC).
- wil421 7y agoFM was created in America and shared with the world. UTC was coined by an international group. In my experience if French speakers are happy with your choice of non-French wording then you should take it while you can.
- SilasX 7y agoReminds me of how French-speaking jurisdictions insist on using a .gouv TLD instead of .gov, almost as if they have to remind you're abbreviating a French word, even though the shorter one is also a valid abbreviation of their language's word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gov#International_equivalents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gov#International_equivalents
- BrentOzar 7y agotl;dr - the English acronym would have been CUT, and in French it would have been TUC, so they picked UTC to avoid favoring either one.
- journalctl 7y agoCoordinated Universal Time and Temps Universel Coordonné, respectively. In my head I see UTC and think “Universal Time Coordinated”.
- microcolonel 7y agoTake it to a brand consultancy, and it'll turn into “Universal. Time. Coordinated.”
- mumblemumble 7y agoI see it, more specifically, as "Universal Time, Coordinated". It never struck me as an acronym that demanded explanation in English.
- ubertakter 7y agoInteresting. I always think of it as the Universal Time Coordinate. Probably because I've done a lot of work in inertial coordinate systems (where the earth rotates in the coordinate system versus the coordinate systems rotating with the earth). Inertial coordinate systems have four dimensions, time and three spatial coordinates.
- zeroonetwothree 7y agoPretty sure the natural order in English is UCT not CUT.
- FabHK 7y agoBut historically there were Universal Times, several of them, and this was the coordinated version of them.
- organsnyder 7y ago
- Deukhoofd 7y agoThis answer misses how several different universal times already existed at the time, which use abbreviations UT0, UT1, etc. UTC was a logical abbreviation for this one, considering it follows the same style, and the desire to find a good compromise between the French and the English speakers.
- Mobius01 7y agoI wonder why a Latin name wasn’t appropriate.
- Nasrudith 7y agoI think the real reason was because we were confident about surpassing Rome and our own modern empires by the 1970s. There was a certain ammount of "looking back to the peaks and we are but a shadow of the greats" meme well beyond they realized they surpassdd the Roman Empire with the use of the fallen in the west Roman empire and the use of Latin (amusingly paying no regards to the Eastern Roman empire aka Byzantium). Now it is used for taxonomies still but the real reason for that is "Do you want to rename every system of classification and have to deal with two systems and names for thousands instead and avoid confusion in a vast body of work?". A resounding no and shudder would be the answer even if we had an undeniably "better" universal language for the purpose that didn't have any "politics" to it.
- excalibur 7y ago> A resounding no and shudder would be the answer even if we had an undeniably "better" universal language for the purpose that didn't have any "politics" to it. So not JavaScript?
- mywittyname 7y agoMaybe because not that many (American) people learn Latin anymore.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thomascgalvin 7y agoI wonder if there's a similar explanation for OWL - Web Ontology Language - or if the creators just really liked smart birds.
- meej 7y agoI can't find a reference at the moment, but IIRC the rationale behind the OWL acronym is something along the lines of "in a language about consistency, why not have one inconsistent thing?"
- goatinaboat 7y agoIt’s just the politically correct way of saying GMT or Zulu, like you are supposed to say BCE and CE instead of BC and AD for years now.
- mnw21cam 7y agoTechnically UTC is not the same as GMT. The two can differ by up to 0.9 seconds. And I'm steadfastly among the ranks of grumpy old farts who still use AD and BC.
- KibbutzDalia 7y agoYou can use it. You have a right to your god. And I have a right not to worship it. Good for you! But don’t criticize the majority of the world who are principled about not worshipping deities they don’t believe in.
- robbrown451 7y agoCalling it BC and AD isn't worshipping God or Jesus, really any more than calling it Saturday is worshipping the Roman God Saturn.
- acheron 7y agoRemember to make your sacrifice to Tíw this morning.
- KibbutzDalia 7y agoAnd that’s why I don’t use that name.
- Nasrudith 7y agoReally the inaccuracy alone would be a decent reason to prefer BCE/CE over BC/AD even if devout.
- 7y ago
- KibbutzDalia 7y agoFrench people.
- rbobby 7y agoDr. Who it up a bit and make it stands for "Universal Time Coordinate". Problem solved.
- mindcrime 7y agoIt's all a big ball of time-wimey, wibbly-wobbly... stuff.
- mumblemumble 7y agoSo, for largely the same reason why ATM cells have a 48-byte payload.
- turc1656 7y agoThis is one of those things that I never even thought to question - the thought never even occurred to me that the acronym doesn't match (for English speakers) because it just is what it is. Funny how we take certain things for granted without thinking about them.
- mikestew 7y agoWell, holee-shit, TIL... Because with my four years of high school French, and having never given it a lot of thought, I always assumed that because $STANDARDS_BODY was French (I assumed, to make theory plausible), then UTC stood for <said with heavy French accent> "Universale Time Coordinatier" or something (and my sincere apologies to our French-speaking HN users). Had my brain actually engaged what I learned in French class, that of course would be incredibly wrong, starting with "what the hell is that adjective doing at the beginning of the phrase?"
- Aloha 7y agoWhen speaking of UTC, I always speak it out as Universal Coordinated Time, or UCT - I never thought about that until today
- haberman 7y agoThe story of how the Prime Meridian was chosen has a similar flavor of controversy. There was a conference in 1884 to decide where it would be, and a large portion of the discussion concerned France's opinion that it should be in a neutral place, not cutting any continent or major population center. France wanted it to go through the Bering Strait or the Azores, and made the argument that the SI meter (introduced nearly 100 years before) was a truly neutral measure, being based on one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Other delegates answered that its is still a French system, because it was France that took the measurement and introduced French error into it. Ultimately practical concerns won out, as 70% of the world's shipping and charts were already using Greenwich as the meridian, and for any other place to truly be a meridian there would need to be an observatory there with telegraph links to the rest of the world. Another gem is the part where the Spanish delegate expressed that he had been authorized to vote for Greenwich as the meridian, but was doing so in the hope that England and the United States will accept the metric system. The president replies that this is outside the scope of the conference, to which the Spanish delegate replies that they know this, and anyway protocol doesn't allow them to vote on "hopes" anyway, but he just needed to say it. Although Greenwich was chosen, France was a holdout and didn't adopt it until 1911, and even then did not call it "Greenwich Time", but rather "Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds." This was their official designation until they adopted UTC. The UK on the other hand still calls their time GMT legally, even though they are actually using UTC now, which is not precisely the same as GMT! The proceedings make for some entertaining and enlightening reading: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm
- Rebelgecko 7y agoOne of my favorite useless facts is that the Prime Meridian of Mars was defined and that definition was universally accepted decades before there was agreement on where to put Earth's Prime Meridian. Goes to show how much easier it is to get things done when you don't have to worry about international pissing contests and people's preexisting biases.
- dmit 7y ago
- denton-scratch 7y agoThe ITU at that time (sorry!) was dominated by the UK (GMT) and the French. The acronym therefore would have had to be TUC (French) or CUT (English). There is history between the French and the English; neither was acceptable - the ITU is an international organization, and the people who attend its meetings are essentially diplomats. So we get an acronym that doesn't stand for anything. It's OK with me... but I could do without the ITU existing at all. They cause nothing but trouble. Dammit, they should stop meddling with the definition of UTC.
- dfox 7y agoSlight clarification: at that time, there was no ITU, but CCITT, which is decidedly french acronym ;)
- denton-scratch 7y agoThanks - you are absolutely correct.
- dlbucci 7y agoInteresting! On an somewhat related note, could someone explain to me why GameCube has always been abbreviated as GCN? GameCube Nintendo seems like it would be a weird answer...
- MrCharismatist 7y agoIt's because "Cube" has an N in it in the metric alphabet.
- ainar-g 7y agoThe Wiki says[1]: > Abbreviated NGC in Japan and GCN in Europe and North America. So it was “GCN” for Europe as well. It could be somethings like “GameCube de Nintendo” in French and Spanish, “GameCube da Nintendo” in Portuguese, “GameCube di Nintendo” in Italian. Maybe they've decided that the European and Romance-langauge markets were more important for some reason? Either that, or some entity has copyrighted “NGC” in the US or Europe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube
- flukus 7y agoNGC was the common abbreviation is for the Neo Geo Color (despite what wikipedia says): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_Pocket_Color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_Pocket_Color
- dfox 7y agoGCN comes from the part number prefix that was used by the ODM (almost certainly BroadOn) in development and “Game Cube (for) Nintendo” makes sense in that context. In similar vein, Wii is REV, as in “REVolution”.
- donpdonp 7y agoI knew the French were running things on the standards end ever since v.32bis. Having it be one or the other seems better than neither of them. When selecting imperial or metric, we don't start using a feeter (half way between a foot and a meter).
- mikorym 7y agoI think the French were the first to create ASCII's first predecessor if I recall correctly, used in line of sight telegrams.
- wglb 7y agoDo you have further information on this? It sounds interesting.
- anticensor 7y agoBaudot code?
- wglb 7y agoAh yes. Quite familiar with Baudot for several reasons. I didn't make the connection.
- r00fus 7y agoUTC is unique/boring and doesn't have semantic baggage. I think that's a plus.
- slowrabbit 7y agoNumber of french speakers in the world... 76 million. Number of english speakers... 1.5 billion. It should be CUT, fuck the french and bad acronyms.
- kakwa_ 7y agoWell, French is commonly spoken every day by a lot more 76M people, it's more in the area of 200 to 300M people. If you go in Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and other former colonies in Africa, you can reasonably expect people to be fluent, at least in cities.
- ourmandave 7y agoMaybe it was that the French were bringing their platinum-iridium meter bar to the meetings and wouldn't hesitate to rap your knuckles if you got out of line.
- 317070 7y agoThose numbers have to be off: According to wikipedia [0]: English 379.0 million native speakers, 1.132 billion total French 76.8 million native speakers, 279.8 million total It seems you might have mixed the French native speakers with a (high estimate of) the English total speakers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
- F_r_k 7y agoI find comfort in the fact you're not a diplomat... I hope
- hashmal 7y agoMaybe we were just trolling english speakers and their curious way to format dates ;)
- gpvos 7y agoAccording to your logic it should be in Chinese.
- jcoffland 7y agoI like to think of it as Universal Time Code.
- kazinator 7y agoThis is exactly the same reason why the International Organization for Standardization is ISO. Both are unofficial backronyms now: International Standards Organization, Universal Time Coordinates.
- dfox 7y agoMore sane backronyms are Universal Time Coordination (which seems to be used by various metrology people) and Universal Time - Coordinated, which makes sense given the UT0 and UT1 timescales.
- jwalton 7y agoI've heard a similar story about Asynchronous Transfer Mode. An ATM cell is 53 bytes long, which seems like a really weird number. The US wanted it to be 64 bytes as they felt this was optimal for them, everyone else wanted it to be 32 bytes, so CCITT split the difference, and made it 48 bytes plus a 5 byte header.
- dfox 7y agoThis is somewhat good idea of how standardization works, but in this case it is not entirely correct. The argument there was essentially that ATM with E1-like framing (and thus somewhat different and longer header) could be used across whole france for voice beare channels without echo cancelation. The 5+48 byte with HEC framing variant at least in theory also satisfies this (somewhat nonsencial) requirement.
- cannabis_sam 7y agoReminds me of NATO/OTAN (English/French)
- stordoff 7y agoAlso reminded me of CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, despite it now being the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire/European Organization for Nuclear Research.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe French.
- agungsukma 7y agoI felt the plus/minus in the coordinate is unintuitive. Let's use an example 07:00:00+01:00 is equal with 08:00:00+02:00. How could 7+1=8+2?