12:02
@SPArcheon It's a music/poetry term relating to the meter (in English, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables) of a line. You "scan" a line of text by marking that pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, so if two lines have the same meter then they "scan" the same.
So when we talk about Common/Ballad Meter/Measure/Verse we're talking about one of several syllable-stress patterns that are re-used a lot, and all the poems and songs using the same pattern scan to each other (you can replace the words without significantly changing the meter).
This is especially amusing when you take two songs with different tunes whose lyrics share a common meter, and swap the lyrics into each others' tunes, which is what most of the above conversation was about.
