Time distinction

Indians & Italians have freed themselves from the protocol of punctuality however their good-day greetings aren’t the identical

Among the a number of issues that Indians and Italians have in widespread is their fantastic disregard for the petty tyranny of timeliness. Punctuality is claimed to be the politeness of princes. Staunch republicans that they’re, Indians and Italians have liberated themselves from such monarchical observances. 

In India, IST stands for Indian Stretchable Time, an idea of outstanding elasticity with an agreeable willingness to increase to accommodate one’s comfort. In Italy, time shows the same obliging capability to enlarge itself to embody the schedule of trains that appear all the time ‘in ritardo’ or delayed. 

However, Indians and Italians have completely different takes on what time of day it’s, and even which day has passed by and which is the day to come back. 

In India, ‘kal’ can confer with each yesterday and tomorrow, the excellence turning into clear solely inside the context through which the phrase is getting used. 

In Italy, yesterday is ‘ieri’, and ‘domani’ is tomorrow. But the place Italians differ most from Indians is with regard to ‘oggi’, at this time in Italian, and the suitable salutation for it.

Unlike the Indian ‘Namaste’, which is workable on a 24/7 foundation so to talk, or so to greet, Italian distinguishes between the divisions of the 24-hour ‘giorno’. 

The appropriate greeting for the morning is ‘Buongiorno’, good day. Buongiorno will get you by until some indeterminate level of no return when Buongiorno morphs into ‘Buonasera’, good night.

It is just not at any unanimously agreed-upon place of the palms of the clock when giorno turns into sera, buono or buona. The result’s a type of temporal one-upmanship, when your Buongiorno at, say, three o’clock within the afternoon is deftly riposted by a Buonasera, with the corrective emphasis on the sera. 

As a well timed bridge between Buongiorno and Buonasera, there’s additionally a Buono Pomeriggio, good afternoon, seldom used besides by nit-picking pedants. 

But linking all these is the Buono, as in ‘Have a good one’, as Americans say, and by no means thoughts the time.

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