The Death of Imagination

You reminded me of this thing most of my South Asian Indian co-workers do: they never use "this" in their construction of talking about today's morning/evening. We run loads starting at 8pm and running until 5am, so we cross the date boundary all the time in conversation. So "in the evening" is never specific enough for us. But where I'd say "this evening, around X o'clock," my co-workers are always saying "today evening, after X P.M." In the afternoon, they'll say "today morning" instead of "earlier today" or "this morning", and I've even heard "no, tomorrow afternoon, not today afternoon" with no pause between "after" and "noon." It makes good phrase construction sense, since there's "yesterday afternoon" and "tomorrow morning", but it always catches my ear. That, and them always wishing "many happy returns on the day" instead of just "many happy returns."

It'd be great for folks like me if there was a specific term for the hours after midnight to sun-up in relation to the prior weekday. We're always talking about Thursday night's load, but then confuse folks when we have to talk about the issue we had with it Friday morning.