Greetings and apologies for the delayed reply to the list and to Carson. So, I finally had a chance to look at this, and it's actually "_I" (as in "India") and not a lowercase L as I originally thought (changing the application font in MATE to Serif confirmed this). While not directly related to what I found, this bug report for the clock applet gave me a hint as to what exactly the typo is, and it looks like it should be "%_I" (as in "India"). The percent sign is missing, hence the time showing up as "_I:ss PM" (where "ss" is seconds which displays correctly on the applet).
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/1451 I've only seen this happen on the OpenBSD port of the MATE Clock applet. Checked MATE Clock on FreeBSD and Fedora (where I run MATE Desktop) and those display correctly. Hope this helps (and makes some sense). -Claudio

