Why do they faff around telling us it is 22 minutes to eight rather than giving us the digital 7:38. They make so many mistakes telling us the wrong hour which could quite easily be remedied by use of digital time pieces.
Not sure I'm with you on that, Michael. I quite like the old-fashioned analogue way of telling the time, though I agree that it may require a little more care in order to be accurate. I particularly enjoy saying 'five and twenty to/past' the hour, because it enables me to use, without seeming too affected, the quaint inverted form of the numeral which has so many echoes in our literary heritage: 'When I was one and twenty/I heard a wise man say', 'Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness', and so on.