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Rants >> Rant 226

:: Today's soundtrack: Coldplay "Clocks (Dance Mix)" ::


I've been fighting with this...er... problem recently, and I don't know why, but I'm going to write about it. It's probably going to be very boring, and I have a feeling that this might be competition for Rant 148 on Toothbrushes for "worst Rant ever," but, meh, what the heck.

A few years ago I rebuilt my living room. I tore down a wall, stripped it out and rebuilt it. So, what I have now is a nice long, room. I want very much to put a big, round clock on one of the far walls so that it would be visible and readable for the whole length of the room. Now, my decorating style is kind of, I don't know, gothic, medieval, Victorian, or whatever you want to call it. There are swords and grotesques, and furniture with lion head wood carvings all over the damn place. Because of this, I think that a clock with roman numerals would better suit the room. In order to explain my little problem with finding a proper roman numeral clock, here is a picture of one I found online somewhere:

Take a look at that clock. REALLY look at it. Sure, it has a lovely enough design to it. Nice, black metal work, and all that. However, take another look at that roman four on it. For some silly-ass reason, the four is depicted as "IIII" instead of "IV" as a proper four should be. Okay, yes THIS clock has a poor four, but surely, most clocks will have the correct four on it? Alas, NO. It seems as though the majority of roman numeral clocks (I'd say somewhere in the 3/4 of them range), have a four as IIII, rather than IV.

I've read several articles on the subject of roman numerals and their modern uses, and in particular, on clock faces. I've heard many different stories ranging from a tale about French king Louis XIV all the way down to ancient Rome and how "IV" was a shorthand way of writing their supreme god Jupiter's name (in other words, some Romans did not want IV on a clock because it would look like "God o'clock"). However, I find that these tales are very old, and outdated to really have any relevance on modern clocks.

Another excuse... er, that is reason for the common use of IIII is that in the earlier part of the twentieth century, many people were illiterate and, well, dumb, so it was easier for them to simply count the I's than to try subtraction. Well, in this day and age, even a product of the flawed United States public school system such as myself learned how to read roman numerals with the subtraction method in primary school and still managed to retain it to this day. Okay, even if you flunked out of elementary school, I'm sure your average redneck can even read roman numerals correctly because how else is he going to know which Super Bowl it is?

I've the clockmakers excuse for using the incorrect four because of symmetry reasons. That IIII on one side looks better against the VIII on the other side. Know what? I don't care. It might sound more fun to say "I never saw nuthin'" but that doesn't mean it's more correct than "I never saw anything." In other words, you clockmakers are just making yourselves look stupid to me.

I never thought that something as simple as wanting a big roman numeral clock would be very difficult to come by, but it really is. I don't think I could stand looking at a clock with an incorrect number notation on it every day in my own house, no matter how pretty the clock was. To those of you who are used to seeing the IIII version of four and think I'm insane, think about this: The Great Clock at Westminster (you know, where Big Ben is) has the four correctly depicted as IV. I'm right, they're wrong. End of story. Bastards.

William (got the time?)

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