text: is noon 12 am or 12 pm ?   aaahhh, now you know why i prefer "marine hours".  noon, i.e. 12:00 on the dot is am, but one second after that is pm.  similarly, midnight is 12:00 pm, but one second after is am.  i always find this extremely confusing because rather than thinking of the times as points on a clock, i tend to think more in terms of english grammar, where 12 is the subject, or main noun, if you will, and the minutes after are merely an adjective modifying the noun.  in this vein, it is am all the way up to 12:59:59 and switches to pm at 1:00 in the afternoon (and, of course, the reverse at midnight), which, of course, is exactly wrong.  oh how i dearly wish the whole planet would kick the damnable am/pm habit and adopt marine hours.  12 is just 12, after which comes 13 and so forth until you get to 23:59:59, then you start all over again at 0.