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I have a few clocks in my house; the old wind-up kind. But I haven’t wound them since I began podcasting. They made too much noise.
It wasn’t just the ticking of the clocks, it was the chiming of their bells. I’d be sitting there trying to record a podcast episode and if it wasn’t the phone ringing or the doorbell, it was the clocks gonging away.
And believe it or not, this has something to do with the etymology of the word clock.
Years ago I remember hearing about a child who’d grown up reading the time from digital clocks so that they’d never learned to read the time on a clock that had hands to mark off the hours.
Later when I had my own children—in a house with a bunch of ticking, chiming clocks—I was surprised one day when I asked my daughter to tell me the time. She was standing right beside the digital clock on the nightstand. She looked around and evidently didn’t even recognize that thing with numbers glowing on it to be a clock.
The word clock appeared first in English in the 9th century but at first it didn’t mean a device for measuring time. At that point in English it was still hanging on to an older meaning that had already evolved in Latin into the timepiece meaning.
At that point clock meant “bell.”
It reappeared in English in 1371 as a word that had moved from Latin to French before showing up in English and by this point it did mean a machine that counted off the hours.
It was the fact that this machine informed people of the time by clanging away on a bell that got it to be called by the same word that a bell itself was called.
One of the clocks in my house is what you might call a grandfather clock.
Clock enthusiasts would call it a long case clock.
It evolved because clocks were not very accurate until some smart person figured out how to use a long pendulum to keep regular spaces between the ticks.
At first this meant that clocks were set on shelves high on the wall with a hole cut in the shelf for the pendulum to hang through.
Later people thought it might be prettier to enclose the swinging pendulum in a high case. I suppose that kept if from inaccuracies induced by small children and dog’s tails as well.
Grandfather clocks only started to be called grandfather clocks after a popular song came out in 1876. It was by Henry Work and called Grandfather’s Clock and told the tale of a high case clock that kept perfect time for 90 years but stopped when the owner died.
參考譯文：
我家有幾只鐘，是老式的上發條的那種。但自從我做了播客（一種讓用戶自由地在互聯網上發布文件，全新的自助式廣播）以后，嫌他們吵，就很少用了。
那些鐘不僅僅發出滴答聲，還有敲擊報時的聲音。我坐在家里準備錄制播客卻總是被干擾，不是電話響就是門鈴響，或者干脆是鬧鐘鈴聲大作。
不管信不信，這跟單詞鐘（clock）的詞源有些關系。
從前我聽聞孩子們從小用慣了電子表，以至于他們不會讀有分針時針指示的時鐘。
后來我有了自己的孩子，在家里放了很多滴答滴答的時鐘。 有一次，我問女兒幾點鐘，當時她旁邊的床頭幾上正放著電子表，令人驚奇的是她居然四周環顧，最后也沒有意識到那個閃著數字的東西是時鐘。
9世紀時英語中第一次出現了"clock” 這個詞，但最初這個詞并不表示計時的器具。那時英語中"clock” 仍然是原來的意思，而拉丁語中它早已變成了時鐘的意思。
那時的英語中，"clock" 是鈴鐺的意思。
到1371年，英語中"clock" 的詞義變成了計時的機器。此時 "clock" 在英語中的詞義已經經過了由拉丁語到法語的轉換。
事實上這種計時的工具的報時原理就是在鈴鐺上撞擊發出鏘鏘聲，自然而然得了個和鈴鐺一樣都被叫做"clock"。
我家中有個時鐘足夠稱得上老爺鐘了。
時鐘愛好者們叫它為長盒子鐘。
時鐘不斷的改進，直到有聰明的人用長鐘擺控制每次擺動的距離大小，時鐘的計時功能才變得精確。
因為有長鐘擺，最初的時鐘是放在墻上的擱板上，再在擱板上鉆個洞把長鐘擺穿過去。
之后人們覺得把搖晃的鐘擺藏在盒子里會比較美觀。我認為這個方法可以繼續保留，這樣避免了小孩或者狗尾巴碰到鐘擺導致時鐘走得不準。
那只老爺鐘是在1876年那首紅極一時的歌之后才被稱為老爺鐘的。歌的創作者是亨利沃克，他把盒式掛鐘稱為老爺鐘，而且講述了一個關于鐘的故事：那個盒式掛鐘精準地走了90年，卻因為它主人的死而停止了擺動。