For those wondering, it’s Ante Meridiem and Post Meridiem. It’s Latin.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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It's After Midnight. Of course.
/j
After Midnight and Post Morning
Arctic Monkeys and Post Malone
Ass Mongul Prostate Mongul
Anterior Mediocrity
Postus Malones
In grade school I had the worst time remembering which was which, so I used to tell myself After Midnight and Pre Midnight lol. I absolutely knew it was Latin for something, but could never remember it for the life of me.
I think I just remembered it as A comes before P alphabetically
In English I just call her Auntie Miriam.
So much better than Aunt Irma
I'm gonna start saying that instead of using the abbreviation. "I'll meet you at 2:30 post merideum."
I’m going to continue using the superior 24 hour time format.
based and ISO pilled
What did you call me?
Duschlampe
no u
BURN!
Thank you!
When he dies will he be renamed as seventhirty'spostmortem?
But have you seen his brother, Eightfortyfivepremidnight?
Weird quirk of English... why do we say "6 o'clock in the morning", "2 o'clock in the afternoon", and "6 o'clock in the evening", but then we say "9 o'clock at night"? It doesnt sound right to say "at morning", "at afternoon", or "at evening". You can say something happened "in the night", but only in a non-specific way, like "she passed in the night". But "I go to work at 11 o'clock in the night" just doesnt work.
Say those words out loud and notice where your lips and tongue are when you do it.
The transition between “at morning” is more work than saying “in the morning” because of the way your mouth moves; you have to readjust between the consonants. Similarly, saying “in the night” sounds ok, and is used quite a bit in literature, but is more effort because it’s longer, and “in the night” sort of forces you to pause between “the” and “night” to adjust your mouth
I took a linguistics course where my professor presented his “theory of least effort” which basically states that words and phrases with complicated pronunciations, ones where you have to do more work to say the thing, eventually get morphed due to “laziness” in everyday speaking, basically just a lack of proper annunciation. It explains a lot of linguistic evolution, particularly prior to the printing press.
At morning is way easier to say.
'in the evening'
How on earth is "in the morning" less effort than "at morning"? Doubly so for "afternoon"?
Prepositions in general don't follow regular patterns in English. I would bet on there being, if any explanation, an etymological one: the origin of morning, afternoon, evening and night are all different, so the constructions which have since been contracted away will have been different.
The sounds IN-TH-MOR progressively close your mouth as you say them. AT-...-MO requires a stop as you convert from open mouth for T and pursed lips for M. AT-NIGHT flows well because mouth and tongue position for the sound for N is almost the same as for the T sound.
The sounds of "in th" can be said without moving any part of the mouth except the tongue, so I have no idea what you mean. Like, you can see them with your teeth touching and holding your lips completely still.
Your argument is completely post hoc to the extent that you're forgetting whatever you were taught about phonology.
And you've skipped the vowel of "the" why, exactly? That's a whole extra syllable in "in the" compared to "at", which is definitely not easier. Your analysis is completely based on the difference between "the m", "the n", "at m" and "at n" but "at the" is grammatical so what about "at the morning"?
I just telling you why it's easier, since you olaimed it's not (with no argument or justification).
In regular speech the vowel in "the" is just rolled through as a transition into the M sound.
If you think the way you say it isn't easier, then that's cool, but you might want to consider the difference between fully enunciating each word and how people talk in regular speech.
I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in "the morning" -it's a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in "in the" than "at".
"At m" is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say "at midday", "at most" and "at many times" shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.
But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that "in the" and "at" are in free variation. You can't just start saying "in the midday" because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify "at most" we'd simplify its pronunciation (maybe to "ab most") not swap preposition.
This is why I'm not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it's not even relevant. That's not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say "I'm in the car" but "I'm on the bus"? I don't know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.
To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.
Night was originally much harder to schedule things in since sundials didn't work and most people historically had the same sleep schedule, so they treated night like a homogenous block
I use in or at interchangeably for either of those cases, now that you're forcing me to confront the truth
German has a similar quirk, though weirdly reversed: "Am Morgen", "Am Nachmittag", "In der Nacht"
It doesn't really come up when taking times though, since we commonly just use "6 Uhr morgens", "3 Uhr nachmittags"*, "12 Uhr nachts", without any preposition and article.
*24h time is also seldom used in casual conversation in Germany
ah yes, at morning and past morning
It's actually kind of close to right. Another user posted the Latin, but it's basically "before noon" and "after noon", and most would say "before noon" is "morning" and "after noon" is "after morning".
That's stupid, everyone know it's post morning!
After Midnight
Not everyone knows wtf a Meridiem is.
It's the number in the middle of a set of numbers right? /s
No, you're thinking of median. The meridiem is a small sum of money you get for a day's expenses, typically from an employer when traveling.
No, you’re thinking of perdiem. A meridian is actually just a fancy linguistic term for a word that names a part of a whole. Like how a wheel is part of a car.
At Morning
Post Morning
I mean
it might as well. As if 12pm makes any sense.
It might have been a play on words and the acronym:
- AM
- hard worker
- still up
- at mourning
- lost a lot of people
I mean Lil Yachty thought a cello was what Squidward played. Anything is possible in the wonderful world of rap.