Without question.
I very strongly suspect the person you were conversing with didn't spot that you said hours and minutes instead of minutes and seconds.
I very strongly suspect the person she is conversing with is a sock on her hand. You are correct in that the question is being asked of this purported expert in a way that seems to perpetuate ongoing ambiguity. The question is whether,
by any established convention, ″ can mean either minutes or seconds depending on context. It is not whether any person once used ″ to mean seconds.
But the real tell is the first (purported) message from this person.
A very confused 'expert' said:
"I may be able to help. Primes use apostrophes to represent different units such as ‘ and “ and ‘“ and “” (without spaces in between) used for hours, minutes, seconds and so on…"
Let's leave aside that the "apostrophes" that appear in the message use the wrong conventions for approximating ′, ″, ‴, and ⁗. The most troubling error is that this purported expert—without any prompting—went right to the one point that Vixen thought needed confirmation. Without being told that the controversy was over whether the symbols could rightly "shift" and represent the next subdivision up the ladder, or (just plain wrongly) the canonical base unit, this person confirmed that the sequence of multiple primes could represent "hours, minutes, seconds, and so on."
Vixen landed (finally) on the explanation that ′ for either hours or minutes, and ″ for either minutes or seconds, was something you
wouldn't use where an examiner would see it, and therefore
isn't an appropriately recognized practice. But
à propos of nothing, this purported expert immediately confirms this admittedly
non-standard vernacular as the thing to do. Vixen doesn't seem to dispute the standard usage: ′ for minutes and ″ for seconds. And we have documentary evidence for this usage. Why didn't the purported expert confirm the
standard usage with no other prompting? Why did they immediately and exclusively confirm the allegedly backwoods vernacular that Vixen wanted to confirm? Doesn't that seem a little suspicious?
Worse, now this purported expert is saying they still use the vernacular notation. In order to become the expert, they would have had those confusing and wrong vernaculars beaten out of them. This really is non-negotiable. We don't separate our informal lives from our professional lives along these lines. Once you have to start using standard notations for work, you just keep using them everywhere because it's easier than trying to keep two different notations in your head.
I already covered the controversy over hours. The canonical base unit for time is hours. It's never been anything but hours. It cannot be anything but hours. This whole shifting of symbols to the next unit upward is purely Vixen's invention, which she tried to justify with a lot of technobabble she ignorantly stole from differential calculus. The only controversy has been over how to notate the base unit. ° was considered for hours of time, based on how the nomenclature gave rise to this whole system of notation.
We call this the "degree symbol," but it's really just part of a different way of notating abbreviations in general. In Italian, some uses of Latin, and other modern languages, abbreviations are formed by superscripting the last portion of a word to the first letter. In contrast, in English, we're more apt to first few significant letters of the word and then a period: ft. for feet, for example.
[1] So the Italian word
octava gets abbreviated in musical notation by
8va. Note how the real semantic portion of the word—the
oct- meaning eight—has also been abbreviated using the numeral. This convenience generally also applies to all the ordinals. The Italian
primo ("first") is abbreviated 1°.
Secondo and
terzo get 2° and 3°, while in French
deuxième and
troisième are 2
me and 3
me. It wasn't so much a special symbol as it was just a superscript o.
As Wikipedia explains (mostly correctly), the expression
29 °C should be read (facetiously) in old Italian as
il ventinovesimo (29°) grado di temperatura, "the twenty-ninth grade of temperature." The superscript has completely transitioned into being a pure symbol and not just the last letter of
ventinovesimo. We have to add C or F now, to be scrupulous, but that wasn't always the case. The only remaining example of
45° to indicate
il quarantaquinto grado of something not explicitly mentioned is
il quarantaquinto grado del circolo, or "the forty-fifth degree of the circle."
But we're talking about hours, minutes, and seconds, and the important thing to remember is that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
You'll find a number of sources including Wikipedia who say that ° was once used also to indicate hours. And also some sources that say it still is, in medicine. I have yet to find a single one of my colleagues in medicine, including medical-school professors, who concur. But yes, ° once was used to mean hours. But since it's really just a shorthand to indicate any ordinal and doesn't actually call out any units, there was considerable discussion about whether it should continue to be used that way. Does 0° 4′ 33″ indicate an angle, a time duration, or a very cold temperature to be outside in?
Part of the discussion was about dropping ° altogether as an anachronism and not using it to mean
anything.
d was proposed for angles, still meaning 1/360 of a circle. And retaining the original
gradus or "degree" (spelled out) for temperature was proposed. The only thing that stuck was using
h to mean hours. ° by itself would continue to mean degrees of arc, and
°C and
°F would be new symbols to represent temperature.
But to understand why this was useful, you have to understand why ° identifying an ordinal grade of
anything meant something.
3° meaning the third degree of a circle works because the circle is a natural unit. It's the third degree, or
gradus, of a
natural object. You can
subdivide a circle any which way: by radians, gradians, or septuagesimal degrees. But you can't meaningfully multiply the natural thing like a circle to get some sort of other thing. You can have a
multiplicity of circles, which isn't the same thing.
Similarly, 3° meaning the third degree of a day works because a day is a natural phenomenon defined by the movement of the earth. You can subdivide it it any which way, such as into
vigiliae etc. the way the Romans did, or into six watches and then further into half-hour "bells" (eight to the watch) as the Royal Navy did.
[2] 4° 3′ could easily (albeit hypothetically) notate, "three bells into the fourth watch," or
5:30 AM, or
5h 30′ if you're measuring time passed since midnight.
The bedrock of the system is that ° (where used, or once used)
always indicates the canonical base unit. In that case, that unit
always the
first division of a
natural object or phenomenon. This is how we anchor the notation to the actual amounts we want to measure. When ° is used by itself, the natural object is a circle.
So what's the natural object, phenomenon, or whatever for degrees of temperature? That's where the headache starts. Fahrenheit divides a physical phenomenon into 100 first-order degrees, but that phenomenon has been variously described, the most hilarious of which is the range of temperatures experienced in Helsinki or Stockholm or some city. Celsius was originally defined by the physical phenomenon of the liquid material phase of water—an observable phenomenon considered reasonably stable at the time. The range of temperature, from coldest to warmest, that water could exist under nominal conditions as a liquid was the natural phenomenon that anchored the system, and the first subdivision is 100 grades, indicated by °C (to indicate which physical basis is used).
And because the basis of the system is that one step broader than ° is a natural unit or behavior, that's why the proposal of reverse primes as multiples was rejected. ‵ would mean, "The first multiple of days." What is that, the week? The month? If ‶ means, "The second multiplication of days," is that 4 weeks to the month? 52 weeks to the year? Once you realize there aren't an even number of weeks in month or days in a year, you see that it's not a good idea. And if ′ can mean hours, what would ° mean (as in how it used to indicate hours)? If ° in the ′-for-hours system means days, then what natural thing is a day the first subdivision of?
Further, if the natural basis for temperature is the liquid phase of water, how can you even think of that arithmetically?
As I said before, these days we stop using primes after arcminutes and arcsecond, although the system did define angular subdivisions notated by ‴ and ⁗. But since geographers and navigators defined them variously and differently, they quickly fell out of use and were replaced by decimalizing the arcseconds if not by decimalizing the degree of arc itself.
The purported expert goes all the way to quadruple prime and says the primes symbols represent "hours, minutes, seconds and so on…" So we have,
′ = hour
″ = minute
‴ = second (never stated, but deduced)
⁗ = ?
What unit of time does our purported expert think a quadruple prime stands for? The time measurement to which this system and these units apply stops at the second in all cases. There is no septagesimal division of a second of time that has ever been used, unless you want to consider the U.S. alternating current frequency.
There never was an "and so on..." for time notated with prime symbols beyond ″. And we long ago stopped using more than a double prime for bits of a circle.
This purported expert is profoundly ignorant of how the system works; how it was invented, revised, and formulated; and
why it works. That's a whole lot more egregious than merely not knowing how to approximate primes on a keyboard or in chat the way we've all done it for decades.
No. There is no expert advising Vixen. There is only Vixen's increasingly dishonest attempts at saving face.
_____________________
[1] This is informal. The abbrevation for feet in American engineering is
ft without the period.
[2] I know about dog watches. Don't @ me.
