Time is Boring
Idiomatic expressions indicate that we find time to be an unarousing concept, in need of association with exciting things to make it more amusing.
“What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.”
— Shakespeare, Henry IV (Open Source Shakespeare 2021)
The Boringness of Time
For whatever reason, perhaps because it’s not directly perceivable, or maybe because we think of it as being divided into an infinite series of perfectly regular intervals, time is evidently unexciting psychologically, similar to coldness, solidness, stasis, order, darkness, downwardness, inwardness, low pitch, small numbers of things, roundness, knowledge and concepts of form. These less exciting qualities are mixed with their perceptual opposites (heat, fluidity, dynamism, disorder, brightness, upwardness, outwardness, high pitch, large numbers, learning and ephemerality) in hundreds of idiomatic English expressions. The fact that time is as well, as demonstrated in the final section…
