A son says to his father: „Look over there at that older man …“ He is using a temporal expression to point to a circumstance that can also be understood – or specified – in calendar terms: „Look at that man, who was born more than thirty years before I was …“ Yet, despite our habit of taking for granted that terms with temporal connotations can be subsumed under a uniformly measured time that progresses ceaselessly and steadily, this reductive approach completely misses the true meaning.

The phrase „an older man“ does not simply denote someone born a long time ago. That is true as well, but merely incidental. In fact, the word „older“ is not used adverbially, but adjectivally. It does not slot the man in question into a standard chronological framework; instead, it attributes to him a quality pointing to his specific situation – his generational affiliation, his role as a senior, his physical constitution and stamina, perhaps even his respectability and authority (or, conversely, their decline), and much more besides. In short: it identifies his presumed state of being and the circumstances of his existence.

The expression also points to a „simultaneity of the non-simultaneous“ – to the age difference between the speaker and the person being discussed, and thus to a differently defined standing within the shared natural and social world; it may also allude to a life that has reached a state of completion, as well as to specific forms of participation in social life.

Interestingly, the speaker’s words also indirectly incorporate the perspective of the person being addressed – or the reciprocal relationship between the two of them and the man being discussed. The father might well be the same age as „the older man.“ Even if the son does not perceive this fact – or perhaps does not even view his father in such terms – it nonetheless resonates unspoken in the background. The reference to the “older man” implicitly touches upon the respective situations of father and son, as well as their states of mind and life circumstances.

The dominant notion of time as a steadily progressing linear flow vastly underestimates and obscures the far richer spectrum of meanings that competent speakers can convey through temporal expressions. The measured time of chronological sequences is not a comprehensive concept of time; rather, it is merely one specific type among a multitude of other qualitative concepts of time. Speaking of “time” in the singular is misleading and obscures the actual plurality of times.

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