Minute

Did the Great Powers really cease fire at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918? Football teams do the two-minute drill so that, in a game, they’re easy with the hurry-up offense. Formerly a gun would signal the last minute of play. Now they use a whistle. In the Great War, they’d blow a whistle, and the men would rise from the trenches, and charge, and die by machine-guns. I was named Michael to remember an uncle, a Lieut. Michael Tierney, so killed.

The adjective minute--and I’m quoting the dictionary--means tiny. The noun minute refers to a unit of time, one-sixtieth of an hour or 60 seconds. The minute man was once a soldier, then a rocket, now a premature ejaculation.

The Jack Kennedy minute.