ABSTRACT
The informal terms employed in quotidian contexts often reveal volumes about the values by which we live. Time figures prominently in many expressions, as it does in the chapters of this part, emerging, for example, in references to the desperate urgency of “working against the clock” or the more casual shrug of imminence accompanying the utterance, “there’s no time like the present.” Positive social judgment is communicated in the notion of “time well spent” pertaining to productive acts of virtue; negative judgment is expressed as well through the articulation of “wasting time” that implies the squandering of some sacred resource; in each case, time is framed as a valuable commodity.
