" the OED also maintains a list of the old words we use most often, and they are words we might expect: the, be, to, of and, of course, and. But what are the most commonly used nouns? Month is at number 40. Life is number 9. Day is 5, and Year is 3. Person is at number 2, while the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.2 The OED observes that our lexicon relies on time not merely as a single word, but as a philosophy: more actions and phrases depend on time than any other. On time, last time, fine time, fast time, recovery time, reading time, all-time. The list goes on for ages. It leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives. And reading just the beginning of that list might lead one to imagine we have come too far, and are travelling too fast, to reinvent time or stop it altogether. But as we shall see in the next chapter, we once had a notion that such things were both possible and desirable. "

― Simon Garfield , Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time