at 8:19 o'clock

[sitifan]

What time will it be when the minute-hand has turned 72 degrees from its position at 8:19 o'clock? (Basic Geometry, by George David Birkhoff and Ralph Beatley, third edition, page 51)
Is the expression "at 8:19 o'clock" correct?

 

[GoesStation]

Not in modern English. When and where was this published?

 

[sitifan]

Not in modern English. When and where was this published?

It was published in 1959 in the United States of America.
https://www.amazon.com/George-David-Birkhoff-Basic-Geometry/dp/B008UBME1E

 

[probus]

Adding to what GoesStation said, nowadays in American English we generally use o'clock only for the exact hour: three o'clock, four o'clock etc .

Rarely I have heard someone ask "What o'clock is it?" But very rarely.

 

[GoesStation]

It was published in 1959 in the United States of America.

The wording was archaic even sixty years ago. I'd guess the first edition was published decades earlier.

 

[Tdol]

Rarely I have heard someone ask "What o'clock is it?" But very rarely.

The only person I have heard use that was a Japanese post-grad student in the UK. It sounded so odd to me that I remember it twenty years later. Only now have I found out that she could have picked it up from a native speaker. She was studying linguistics.

 

[GoesStation]

I've always loved 'What watch?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfeiIL2Tz8U

That's a particularly poignant scene if you know that the actors themselves had recently escaped from the Nazis.

 

[Rover_KE]

... in American English we generally use o'clock only for the exact hour: three o'clock, four o'clock etc .

That goes for all varieties of standard English.