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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/15834
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One thing to remember is that our concept of time and specifically splitting much of our experience into units of time ("he held his breath for a second" and "I'll see you in 15 minutes" and "It will take 3 hours to walk to the next village") is very modern and evolved in the context of timepieces of increasing accuracy.

Prior to accurate time pieces, people made limited reference to units of time. A monk might refer to hours of the night (although these varied in length by season) and a Roman might refer to time by a sun dial (again of variable length by season) but this was not how the common person thought of time.

It is in fact anachronistic to have your farm boy or girl in a setting analogous to Earth earlier than the Renaissance (and probably much later in most places) talk about seconds and minutes.

However, I think you'll find that most references to a specific passage of time are unnecessary. In the examples above, "he held his breath for a moment", "I'll see you shortly", "it will take all morning to walk to the next village"

Original score: 3