Moments, Ounces and Atoms

How To Do Everything

NPR

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2014

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We tell you the worst way to clean your chimney, how to take moment and the one thing you should be scared of this week.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When we say it'll take a moment or give me a moment we generally think that that's just a
0:05.1	loose flexible amount of time it doesn't actually mean anything it turns out it's
0:09.4	not uh... chad can you tell us about this yeah Yeah, that's right. I mean historically it actually means 90 seconds.
0:16.0	So where does that come from? You know there's there's a bunch of different sources that that kind of claim where that is but the one that I found is the Oxford English
0:24.5	dictionary from about 1398 John of Trevisa he wrote that there was 40 moments
0:29.9	in an hour hence 90 seconds and called, what did he call them?
0:33.3	He called the moments?
0:34.4	Yes, that's right.
0:35.2	So when you think about, before you learn this,
0:38.2	when you think, when you thought about a moment,
0:40.2	or when you told somebody, you know, just give me a moment.
0:43.0	How long do you think you were imagining it to be?
0:46.0	Maybe 10 seconds?
0:48.0	Yeah.
0:49.0	Well, let's try this in audio terms.
0:52.0	So I'm going to say give me a moment and then let me know when you
0:57.6	think I should have come back and we'll subtract that from the actual time.
1:00.8	Are you ready? Sure. All right. So just give me a moment.
1:06.0	Working on a night move.
1:10.0	Trying to make some front page drive. Are you still there? Yeah, see I pretty quickly I felt like I should be coming back.
1:16.6	That took too long. Yeah like I'm not on old with Verizon or something right? Yeah, just us.
1:24.0	Like, I feel like if Verizon knew that a moment
	...

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