Just a moment

Just a moment, we hear sometimes, and then this "moment" seems to be taking ages. So how long IS a moment? How long should it be? Time is a highly individual notion and it is different for different people, sometimes even entire cities have their own time measures. For example, a new York minute is defined by the ever-hurrying new yorkers as the time that elapses between the red traffic light goes on and someone honks their car impatiently. But a moment is a horse of a different colour. In medieval England a moment was a definite unit of time and its length used to be approximately equal to a minute and a half. So the next time someone says "Just a moment" and goes away and has a nice cup of tea while you're waiting, you can think of the auld lang syne and say that moments used to be shorter.