I'm always brought up short when someone says/writes "24/7/365" because it really doesn't make sense.
"24/7" means 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"24/365" means 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
"24/7/365" means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 weeks a year?
I know, I know, it's become an idiom, and it's like "I could care less", and you can't try to understand it except as an atom that caries a meaning, but it just looks wrong to me.
Sorry - I'll now return you to your regular programming.
As an expression of time, its origin is a relation to business hours. 24 hours is "we don't close overnight." 7 days is "we don't close on weekends." 365 days is "we don't close on holidays." Those are the standard periods of unavailability.
If the sole holiday were a single Golden Week sometime in the year, the idiom may indeed have been "24/7/52", but holidays are simply scattershot like that.
The slashes aren't maths operators, they're language/grammar/shorthand. The lexeme as a whole is merely a mnemonic for the linger phrase: "24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year."
It's not that the individual segments relate to each other. Rather they answer three sets of questions:
What are your daily hours? All of them. 24 hours / day.
What weekdays are you open? Again, all of them. 7 days/week.
What holidays do you observe per year? None, we're open 365 days/year.
Since there's rarely a monthly cycle to business closings and there aren't a standard number of days per month, that's elided.
It also helps to realize that human timekeeping is really based on three independent phenomena which are utterly unrelated. There are day-based units: seconds, minutes, and hours are all subdivisions of the period of rotation of Earth about its axis.
The month is based on the Moons orbit about Earth. That it is roughly 30 days is a notional convenience, similarly its rough divisibility by 4 into 7 day periods. The week is entirely synthetic (though profoundly persistent).
And the year on Earth's orbit about the Sun. Again, relationship to days and months are entirely arbitrary.
That's why it often seems time units are arbitrary. They are.
There's a brief book which Kay's this ought and traces the calendar through time, The Seven Day Cycle.
7 *days* per *week*
24 *hours* per *day*
365 *days* per... *year*
Why you'd read that as 365 weeks per year I'm not sure, because there's no pre-established convention that would lead you to interpret it that way (both 24 and 7 would have to be "per week"), and most people know there are 365 days in a year.
That just really doesn't make sense at all. I know that the numbers means, and are for, but if someone is saying every hour in the year, to say 24/7/365 is just nonsense.
Of course, this is a losing battle. People just don't care if what they say makes sense, they just say stuff and assume that people will understand. This is one of the things that makes language bizarre, miraculous, infuriating, and impossible to analyse. I note examples like this because they are caltrops on the road for NLP.
They are all relative timeframes by which a store my be closed; certain hours during the day, certain days during the week, and certain days during the year. Your inability to make sense of it doesn't affect the rest of us. It's like a creationist saying evolution doesn't make sense to them: at some point it is the result of a willful ignorance that you are bragging about. It doesn't make for very interesting trolling.
> They are all relative timeframes by which
> a store my be closed; certain hours during
> the day, certain days during the week, and
> certain days during the year.
Huh. That's a way of interpreting it I'd never seen. Thank you.
> Your inability to make sense of it doesn't
> affect the rest of us.
No, except that it may help people see that what they think is obvious isn't always obvious to others.
> ... it is the result of a willful ignorance
> that you are bragging about.
Well, that's obviously your interpretation, but if others see it that way then it explains the hitherto mysterious yoyoing of points on my comments.
I would argue that no single statement can make sense. Sense is made when multiple statements are combined.
It's really all just about appropriate cognitive load. Every statement must be processed and it's great to be as accurate as possible and as accurate as the consensus agrees to.
Anything higher quality than that falls under the category of "great writing," which only a handful of people cherish.
Gotcha, here in the US most people will take off that week, but no business would ever shut down entirely for a week. You'd piss off all of your customers and associates. (Which is why American workers hate dealing with ones in the EU, they're always on vacation!)
Whoever doesn't stay home during the Christmas period in the US gets accolades from management, so there's incentive to work if you're career-focused.
"24/7" means 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"24/365" means 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
"24/7/365" means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 weeks a year?
I know, I know, it's become an idiom, and it's like "I could care less", and you can't try to understand it except as an atom that caries a meaning, but it just looks wrong to me.
Sorry - I'll now return you to your regular programming.