Watches are worn on the wrist, so up is always the pinky side of the wrist. The beauty of an analog watch is that it is a graphical display of time that doesn'

Watches are worn on the wrist, so up is always the pinky side of the wrist. The beauty of an analog watch is that it is a graphical display of time that doesn't even need numbers. The hands indicate both a numeric time as well as a representative of how far through a day, hour, or minute you are. This is the same reason that cars still have dial style gauges. The brain can parse the relative location of a rotary dial faster than it can parse 4376RPM. Once you teach your brain how an analog clock works it reads as fast or faster than a digital clock.