Thank you, Robert! I think you are right about those NOISEWORDS. I tested against other words in that set and noticed the same behavior where %CONTAINS did not return results but the [ operator did. Appreciate the follow-up and detailed explanation!
Thank you for the responses. To clarify, I did read the documentation for %CONTAINS as a starting point before posting this question on the developer community.
The datatype of the column (property) I am using %CONTAINS on is of %Text and the LANGUAGECLASS is set to a custom class that extends %Text.English.
Perhaps there is something in the docs that I'm missing that would cause the issue with the searching for the "time" word I'd mentioned above.
However, it seems like @Robert Cemper 's suggestion with using the [ operator achieves the same functionality I'm looking for with a similar performance time - when tested in the SQL page of the management portal.
$ORDER works perfectly. Thank you all!