You might think, but a couple of weeks ago, uhh, a friend was sitting on the toilet at work when m…, I mean his equipment retracted and shot a stream of urine over the rim, which fortunately(?) was contained by his pants and underwear. Reportedly, he had to drape them over the vents in his urine-smelling office until they were dry enough so that he could go home and change clothes.
I feel like we could fix this problem with new terminology. We have words for many various events and stretches of the diurnal cycle: Dawn, sunrise, morning/forenoon, afternoon, sunset, and dusk, but nothing quite so definite for the night hours. I would certainly understand what it would mean if somebody said, “the evening of the 3rd into the wee hours of the 4th,” but those terms lack precision. Both foremidnight and aftermidnight would convey the meaning, but sound awkward.
Historically, I think it makes sense that we base the reckoning of a day on our natural photoperiod. Until the advent of artificial lighting, the night was a liminal period of time, and hardly anybody was awake and active to make dividing it up useful. I suppose we could change the rollover time to noon, but that divides up the sunlit period across different days. At least we already have words to use, and “the morning of January 1st” would be unambiguous, as would “the night of January 1st,” but counterintuitively, the morning of January 1st would occur after the afternoon. Making it some other time would just be just as arbitrary, and much more awkward. Sunrise, for instance, varies quite a bit throughout the year. (By about half an hour even at the equator, and by almost 5 1/2 hours in Oslo.) So, now does the sunrise on January 1st occur just after or just before the new day begins? What about places where the sun stays in the sky for longer than a clock-day during parts of the year?
Better to just agree on some new words, I think.
For 15 years I lived in an apartment with the bathroom shelves directly above the toilet. It’s a corollary of Murphy’s Law that anything dropped in the bathroom somehow will land in the toilet bowl. Hence, the lid stays closed.