Or were all the old second counting systems wrong?
Many people have pointed out that if you start a timer on your phone and count out to 45 Mississippis, hippopotamus or number-one thousands it now ties out to a minute.
I have tried it a dozen times myself and after 45 counts I get anywhere between 54 to a minute and 4 seconds.
I specifically remember counting chunks of time as long as 15 minutes and not being off by a minute.
I think that as we get older words have more meaning, so we say them correctly by default. Mississippi or one-thousand both take longer to say and they’ve never kept the correct time for me, so I learned as a child to use ‘and’ instead. Most of the kids I knew would try to say it so quickly it was never the full word (Mississippi was the most common and would sound to me like they were saying missip), but for whatever reason my brain has always wanted to use the full word and my timing would constantly be off.
It’s just a thought though.