When telling the time, are the following expressions legal or natural to native speakers:
e.g.:
1. It's thirty past six (without adding "minutes").
2. It's half an hour past six (adding "an hour").
Also, are there any difference or restrictions between using after and past (Are they ALWAYS interchangeable)? And is it common to use preposition to in "It's twenty-three to seven"(weird for me because 6:37 is definitely more straightforward, so why bother say it the other way round)?
Best Answer
No-one says “thirty past”, perhaps because it is equidistant with “thirty to”, something else no-one ever says. It is always half past. You can of course say 6:30, though, which is pronounced “six thirty”.
It doesn’t matter if it “seems more straightforward” to you to use numbers greater than thirty for minutes, because in fact one never does that when saying something like “twenty of six”. If you said 5:40, that’s of course different. It can’t be “forty after five o’clock”; it can only be “twenty to six” or “five forty”.
People wouldn’t normally say “twenty-three to seven”, because that’s too precise for most clock-reading on a normal dial, or for most people’s purposes. One would just say “it’s about/almost twenty to seven”.