A Quick Minute?
“Have we fucking invented a near-useless version of time travel”
If you've spent any amount of time on YouTube, you've likely heard the phrase "a quick minute". It's often used to describe a potentially brief tangent that fills the viewer in on something not so brief. Most would ignore this phrasing and assume it referred to a regular normal human minute.
But not me. Oh no. Not me. My inquisitive mind couldn't let this one go. In the past few years, my interest in the language we use (to ourselves and others) has increased; mostly because of my own struggles with mental health and wanting to overcome them but also because learning is cool.
Anyway....so what is a "quick minute" and how does it differ from a regular normal human minute? Have we fucking invented a near-useless version of time travel or are people just tossing adjectives around without any regard for their meaning?
Lucky for you, it's summer in Arizona and I'm unable to spend quality time outside without melting into a puddle of sentient beard hair and googly eyes and I ain't got shit else to do except grasp at things to entertain myself with, so for the past few weeks, I've been perfecting an algorithm that can properly calculate the length of a regular normal human minute and that of an internet quick minute.
If you're asking yourself, "Is...is this how he spends his free time?!", the answer is yes, sort of. I tend to do whatever thing is the shiniest at the moment and often, I discover additional shiny things along the way that capture my interest and then I find more and on and on and on. I try to lean into the things that excite me without talking or guilting myself out of it and occasionally, I finish said thing.
“I’m certainly not the authority on...well, anything really”
For starters, let's take a look at the regular normal human minute. We all understand the regular normal human minute to be 60 seconds. Using this as a starting point, I ran a series of tests that calculated the duration of the regular normal human minute, and here's one of the results:
regular normal human minute calculation results
quick minute calculation results
Next, I ran a series of tests that calculated an internet quick minute based on the deliverer’s ability to get to the fucking point, whether or not they were live streaming and their level of excitement for the topic being discussed.
As you can see, a quick minute is much longer than a regular normal human minute so why is it referred to as quick?
I'd like to point out that the entirety of this is meant to be ridiculous. It was created to garner a chuckle and provide a bit of insight into my odd and inquisitive inner workings, it also provided me with a little fun, some laughs of my own, and a simple coding project to work on in my free time. Using "quick minute" is harmless but the takeaway here should be to develop your own methods for questioning things and then digging in to discover their meanings. Some words and phrases ARE harmful and by removing them from your lexicon you're working to make shit better.
I'm certainly not the authority on...well, anything really. I'm still on this adventure we call life figuring shit out as I go. With that typed, there are likely words and phrases I've used erroneously, so please enlighten me.
As soon as my fire handling gloves, fecal sanitization spray, and bags of imported spoiled fruit arrive, I'll share my findings on hot takes, shit takes, bad takes, and plain old normal takes.
Be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and be kind to nature.
