I intensely dislike the following phrases:
- Give me a second
- Just a moment
- Give me a moment
- In a moment
All of those are usually an excuse to take an indeterminate amount of time that you can’t hold people accountable for. “Give me a second” is the worst, because a second does have a specific meaning, and no one ever means that when they say, “Just a second”. And, of course, you are just being a jerk if you pause 1000 milliseconds and then say, “A second is up.” I know, I’ve tried it repeatedly. It wasn’t received well.
Mostly you just have to live with it, but I think that allowing this vagueness is a problem with kids. They will say it when they don’t want to do things. Then, you will have no idea if they mean they really need a few seconds to finish a sentence or they effectively mean never or not until you make me. Then they will also interpret it however they want when you say it, meaning they repeat their demand in 5 seconds or less because “a moment has no real length”.
I could try to eliminate the use of the word moment all together in the house, but I don’t think that will go well. I’m not sure I could force that in good conscience, and I don’t think my spouse would buy into it.
Backing up, what even is a moment? Why do people say it when they mean a few seconds or 15 minutes or an hour? It clearly indicates some history as a unit of time. Googling that, I landed on Wikipedia’s page for Moment as a unit.
Wikipedia says “The movement of a shadow on a sundial covered 40 moments in a solar hour, a twelfth of the period between sunrise and sunset.” Or, a moment is 1/480th of the time from sunup to sundown. I guess that as we defined the hour better and moved from moments to minutes, the original meaning got lost, and people only remember that it varied in length.
If a moment is 1/480th of the amount of daylight for that day, that means that how long a traditional moment is varies throughout the year. On the poles, it can be as little as 0 seconds on days with no daylight or as long as 3 minutes when you have 24 hour daylight.
I don’t want a term that can vary in meaning. If the meaning of a moment can change once, I can try to change it again. I decided that allowing a moment to vary so much when used in my house would be too difficult. Thus, I decided to standardize. In our house a moment means 90 seconds. I could have gone with 3 minutes; but 90 seconds, splitting the extremes in half, seemed like a nice time. Really, I am retro-actively reasoning why I went with 90 seconds. I don’t really recall.
Now, instead of saying “give me a moment” to the kids, I’m more likely to say give me 3 moments (4.5 minutes). Sometimes, I’ll say we will leave in 10 moments (15 minutes). Sometimes, I will say just give me a moment when I expect to be ready in 90 seconds or less.