Good evening!

Good evening!

I was out to the post box yesterday, around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, just a short walk, when coming from the opposite direction was a young lad having just been disgorged from his school bus, aged possibly around seven, not the bus, him, who as he approached said very cheerfully, “Good evening!” I responded accordingly, but it made me think. My first thought was to consider how delightfully polite he was, either a credit to his parents or to his school or both, but then I wondered about his type of greeting.

To me it was afternoon, yet to him it was evening, or was that a greeting that he put out automatically at that time of day without considering the actual part of the day that he inhabited?

The time when the greeting ‘good morning’ is supplanted by ‘good afternoon’ is fairly clear if one decides that passing from am to pm is the deciding factor, in other words going through the mid-day time phase, or through twelve noon, and this could therefore be when the greeting should change.

That may be the official way of deciding, but to ordinary people they might consider the change time to be as they have their lunch, if they have such. This approach makes it easier to change the greeting because they don’t have to look at a watch or clock or the stars; they just need to consider their feeding habits, which is simpler.

But what about the change from ‘good afternoon’ to ‘good evening’? A general local survey amongst the natives proved quite inconclusive. The options put forward included the possibility that it could be related to lighting-up time which would vary as the year progressed, and would be extremely difficult to decide in the country with no lights, or to a fixed time such as 5 o’clock, or to when darkness fell which would alter through the year, or for children when they leave school to return home. I think the turn of the tide is a red herring, and that perhaps one of the other options should be the correct one, but I wonder which it should be.