Eastern Time Americans think they are the standard and never clarify that they are, indeed, Eastern Time. It’s always “talk to you at 11” or “the workshop starts at 3 pm.” Because their 3 pm is THE 3 pm.
CT, MT or PT people never do that. The ET Canadians don’t do it either.
“Eastern Time Americans think they are the standard ”
Quite…. we’re nothing like that Central Time rabble.
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Who’re you calling rabble? Dang ET snobs…
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Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington are on Eastern time, and they’re the quintessential U.S. places.
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Washington is on PST.
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Washington, DC, the capital of the United States, is on Eastern time. This, and the location of Wall Street in NY, on Eastern time, add to the feeling that the “real” U.S. is all on Eastern time. I am from Seattle, Washington, and yes, we’re on the Pacific coast.
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I’ve lived in Colorado and New Mexico for some time in the past, so I’m ALWAYS conscious of it being 11:00 P.M. in places like Nashville and Chicago when it’s midnight here in Ohio. And I’ll be thinking “…and it’s 10:00 in Denver and Salt Lake”.
You’re living in western Illinois, so you’re on Central time (same as Dallas and Minneapolis).
I have my continental time zones pretty down pat. It’s a lot of the international ones I have to constantly check.
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“lived in Colorado and New Mexico for some time in the past”
I vaguely knew of Central Time (just from TV announcements growing up) and I knew California was in a different time zone but I never realized there was Mountain Time till I was there the first time… (around 12 years old).
TV seemed like a weird mishmash of everything being too early or too late (I don’t think they had their own feeds and so they used Central/Eastern or Pacific feeds which just didn’t… fit very well).
Things might be different now but it was strange at the time….
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kharking:
“Washington is on PST”
…I think he meant Washington D.C., not Washington state.
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When I was a child in the state of Washington I found it very confusing that people thought the “real” Washington was Washington, D.C. I get it now, but when you’re on the West coast, especially the Pacific Northwest, the East seems very remote indeed.
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I know. My initial comment was too cryptic.
I have traveled the entire country and understand that D.C. looms large in the psyche of the eastern half of the country. I just dislike the provincialism that Clarissa is highlighting here. Half of the people who I met didn’t know that there was a whole state named Washington and the rest didn’t understand why it might be useful to linguistically distinguish between the city on the east coast and the state on the west.
One could argue that half of Washington state’s crazy ideas are an attempt to gain status and significance to the other Washington (D.C.).
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The best part: the FL peninsula is ET, and the panhandle is Central. This is why they so often call our elections incorrectly, when they try to call them early: the panhandle is deeply red, and the polls don’t close until an hour later there.
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“the panhandle is Central.”
I have never understood why states are divided into time zones…. when you look at the map it seems it would be easy to redraw them by state….
In Europe IINM it’s by country with a few oddities (Peninsular Spain is on Central European time while the Canaries are Western European time – Spain should be Western but IIRC Franco wanted the same time as Germany and no one has thought to challenge that since….)
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It’s a “tradition” for me to, on the last day of a month, tune in KMOX in St. Louis, or WMAQ in Chicago, or WSM in Nashville on the AM dial between 11:00 P.M. and midnight just to be listening to a station on, for example, the first of March that is still broadcasting live in the month of February—right here in Columbus Ohio.
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That’s really cool. 🙂 Great tradition.
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….actually, the “tradition” is done between midnight and 1:00 A.M. when it is between 11:00 P.M. and midnight Central Time in those cities (a.k.a. St. Louis, Chicago, Nashville)
…also: the Chicago station is WGN (AM 720)
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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