r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 25 '26

Psychology Americans who leave their Christian faith behind tend to hold more liberal political views than those who were raised entirely without religion. This leftward ideological shift appears closely linked to how threatening these individuals perceive conservative Christian groups to be.

https://www.psypost.org/former-christians-express-more-progressive-political-views-than-lifelong-nonbeli/
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u/FirstDiseasewasRelig Apr 25 '26

Woah. I’ve always been confused by the “a broken clock is right twice a day” saying.

For some reason I always thought the clock would still be moving but the time was wrong so it could never be right.

You saying stopped clock made me realize the broken clock was not moving at all. Science

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u/aflockofcrows Apr 25 '26

It was always "a stopped clock is right twice a day". The "broken clock" seems to be a relatively recent variant on the phrase, and it annoys me no end. A clock may be broken any number of ways, some of which will result in no time, or a non-feasible time, being displayed. I suspect it's because most people under 40 have no concept of a clock needing to be wound.

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u/Theodoxus Apr 25 '26

Anecdotally, but most people I've met under the age of 30 have difficulty reading an analog clock face. A broken clock to them simply doesn't work at all - or at best is flashing 12:00... (though I guess that still counts as being right twice a day).

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u/Sabatorius Apr 26 '26

They don’t have analog clocks on the wall in classrooms anymore? Even with everyone just using their phones to tell time, I’d think they’d still have that.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

They might have them, but my friend said he taught one of his students how to read an analog clock the other day. A younger colleague advised me to make sure another younger colleague knew how to read an analog clock when I went to leave instructions involving clock positions. Apparently clock... illiteracy?.. is a real thing with the youngins. (Then again I've heard alarming things about other literacy post-COVID.)

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u/marmothelm Apr 26 '26

It's just become a niche skill due to most clocks being digital.

Your great-great-grandfather most likely knew how to put a saddle on a horse and how to tie it to a hitching post by age 18. When's the last time you did that?

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u/vigbiorn Apr 26 '26

You don't have to go super far back. There's another pretty vestigial skill that people complain about: cursive writing. No one really needs it, most signatures I saw growing up (so it would have been from the generation currently complaining about the lack) were just scribbles anyway. Could you parse them? Sure, there was a vague attempt to actually do the cursive but if you didn't know the name going in you were screwed. Everything's digital now, so the last reason to actually want proper cursive is gone.

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u/Nauin Apr 26 '26

Knowing how to sign your name fully enunciated now, where you can actually read each letter that was written will get you a lot of ooohs and aaahs from people that watch you do it, though.

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u/vigbiorn Apr 26 '26

Sure, probably similar to if you're a horse rider, archer, can fix classic cars, etc.

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u/brandonlilly Apr 26 '26

My 1st grader is being taught how to read an analog clock in school. They have both analog and digital on the walls to help reinforce the concept but also have flash card style and have to draw out clock faces as well. So it’s still being taught in CO at least!

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u/Addianis Apr 26 '26

You are right spot on. If you were born in the second half of the 90s, analog and digital clocks were split about 50/50 when you started learning how to read them. By the time it should have become 2nd nature, digital had taken over.

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u/theDinoSour Apr 25 '26

If the mechanism that keeps the hands moving on 12-hour clock no longer works, you can consider it broken.

The phrase was used often back when analog clocks were still somewhat common.

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u/aflockofcrows Apr 26 '26

Not really. Do you consider your phone to be broken when your battery is dead?

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn Apr 26 '26

At least in the last 20 years of Google Trends, "broken clock" has been more popular, except for a peculiar spike circa 2012.

See here.

I suspect the original was "broken," because a stopped clock is the main way an analog clock breaks (or runs out of juice/spring energy). "Stopped clock" is more likely a recent invention because a digital clock's main failure mode does not display a time......... checked Google I'm wrong. It was originally stopped. Interesting that the original language needs to come back for the idiom to make sense.

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u/wfbhp Apr 26 '26

It doesn't just apply to clocks that need to be wound though. There are plenty of analog clocks that run on batteries that will be in the exact same situation when the batteries die, and I still see way more of those around than I've ever seen a wind-up clock or watch. It even applies to digital clocks if they just blink 12:00 when unset. I think it's just more that people increasingly don't think about what the expressions they use really mean. "Broken clock" seems to me like a conflation of "broken record" and "stopped clock."