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I have a few clocks in my house; the old wind-up kind. But I haven’t wound them since I began podcasting. They made too much noise.
It wasn’t just the ticking of the clocks, it was the chiming of their bells. I’d be sitting there trying to record a podcast episode and if it wasn’t the phone ringing or the doorbell, it was the clocks gonging away.
And believe it or not, this has something to do with the etymology of the word clock.
Years ago I remember hearing about a child who’d grown up reading the time from digital clocks so that they’d never learned to read the time on a clock that had hands to mark off the hours.
Later when I had my own children—in a house with a bunch of ticking, chiming clocks—I was surprised one day when I asked my daughter to tell me the time. She was standing right beside the digital clock on the nightstand. She looked around and evidently didn’t even recognize that thing with numbers glowing on it to be a clock.
The word clock appeared first in English in the 9th century but at first it didn’t mean a device for measuring time. At that point in English it was still hanging on to an older meaning that had already evolved in Latin into the timepiece meaning.
At that point clock meant “bell.”
It reappeared in English in 1371 as a word that had moved from Latin to French before showing up in English and by this point it did mean a machine that counted off the hours.
It was the fact that this machine informed people of the time by clanging away on a bell that got it to be called by the same word that a bell itself was called.
One of the clocks in my house is what you might call a grandfather clock.
Clock enthusiasts would call it a long case clock.
It evolved because clocks were not very accurate until some smart person figured out how to use a long pendulum to keep regular spaces between the ticks.
At first this meant that clocks were set on shelves high on the wall with a hole cut in the shelf for the pendulum to hang through.
Later people thought it might be prettier to enclose the swinging pendulum in a high case. I suppose that kept if from inaccuracies induced by small children and dog’s tails as well.
Grandfather clocks only started to be called grandfather clocks after a popular song came out in 1876. It was by Henry Work and called Grandfather’s Clock and told the tale of a high case clock that kept perfect time for 90 years but stopped when the owner died.
参考译文：
我家有几只钟，是老式的上发条的那种。但自从我做了播客（一种让用户自由地在互联网上发布文件，全新的自助式广播）以后，嫌他们吵，就很少用了。
那些钟不仅仅发出滴答声，还有敲击报时的声音。我坐在家里准备录制播客却总是被干扰，不是电话响就是门铃响，或者干脆是闹钟铃声大作。
不管信不信，这跟单词钟（clock）的词源有些关系。
从前我听闻孩子们从小用惯了电子表，以至于他们不会读有分针时针指示的时钟。
后来我有了自己的孩子，在家里放了很多滴答滴答的时钟。 有一次，我问女儿几点钟，当时她旁边的床头几上正放着电子表，令人惊奇的是她居然四周环顾，最后也没有意识到那个闪着数字的东西是时钟。
9世纪时英语中第一次出现了"clock” 这个词，但最初这个词并不表示计时的器具。那时英语中"clock” 仍然是原来的意思，而拉丁语中它早已变成了时钟的意思。
那时的英语中，"clock" 是铃铛的意思。
到1371年，英语中"clock" 的词义变成了计时的机器。此时 "clock" 在英语中的词义已经经过了由拉丁语到法语的转换。
事实上这种计时的工具的报时原理就是在铃铛上撞击发出锵锵声，自然而然得了个和铃铛一样都被叫做"clock"。
我家中有个时钟足够称得上老爷钟了。
时钟爱好者们叫它为长盒子钟。
时钟不断的改进，直到有聪明的人用长钟摆控制每次摆动的距离大小，时钟的计时功能才变得精确。
因为有长钟摆，最初的时钟是放在墙上的搁板上，再在搁板上钻个洞把长钟摆穿过去。
之后人们觉得把摇晃的钟摆藏在盒子里会比较美观。我认为这个方法可以继续保留，这样避免了小孩或者狗尾巴碰到钟摆导致时钟走得不准。
那只老爷钟是在1876年那首红极一时的歌之后才被称为老爷钟的。歌的创作者是亨利沃克，他把盒式挂钟称为老爷钟，而且讲述了一个关于钟的故事：那个盒式挂钟精准地走了90年，却因为它主人的死而停止了摆动。