We live in a countdown social environment. This year the Countdown to Coronavirus Vaccine has replaced both Countdown to Christmas and Countdown to New Years.
The ads for countdown timers are unending. My favourite is itsalmo.st (doesn't that look like a visual tongue twister). The site is It's almost - and describes itself as a snazzy free countdown tool.
The countdown itself is fairly recent. It came into our social fabric in 1952 (1953 also given), according to Merriam-Webster. It got its boost from rockets, television, and broadcast engineering, mostly.
On record for its first use is the Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang. Lang, best known for his movies Metropolis and M, was working on a science fiction film called Woman in the Moon that featured a dramatic rocket launch, preceded by a countdown of the final ten seconds before launch.
In sports, Cambridge University's rowing race was known for using a countdown to signal the start of the race. No date is given for this.
The military had the expression zero hour, used from 1915 onwards, Implied is a countdown. They also had D-Day H-Hour and T-Time to refer to start time. It is associated with the dropping of the first atomic bomb, zero hour and ground zero.
Given how we have a countdown on the alert everywhere, I thought there would be some good countdown jokes, but I was disappointed. Here it the one I chose:
Every year on New Year's Eve, when everyone's counting down the final 10 seconds to ring in the new year, I get up off the couch and stand up. I stand up and raise my left leg and just leave it raised for a little while until the countdown finishes and midnight strikes - that way I always start the new year off on the right foot.
Today's picture is one of the pretty Christmas trees at last year's Fantasy of Trees event.
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