Re: USAGE: Well, at least he created numbers.....

Tristan wrote:
(actually, some comments on multiple msgs.)

>On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Muke Tever wrote:
>
>> From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@...>
>> > Clint Jackson Baker wrote:
>> >
>> > > Then how would the Englishman, Australian, Nigerian,
>> > > et al say those numbers?  I don't know of any
>> > > distinction among English speakers, except that some
>> > > use "and" to separate the tens and ones from
>> > > everything else, eg "five hundred and thirty two",
>> > > "four thousand and nine".  Is this what you mean?
>> > Just so, and I should have said as much.  I think
>> > it was around 1950 when the "one hundred twenty three"
>> > style, without the traditional "and", became commonly
>> > taught in North America.
Maybe even a little earlier-- I can recall (mid 40s) being taught that "and"
was redundant, (implied: not nice, iggurant, countrified, etc. etc.)  Hard
to believe that the South Dakota education system was in any way in the
avant-garde, here.

My grandfather (1879-1955) and some very old folks of my parents' generation
(b. ca. 1900s) sometimes said year-dates as "Eighteen and 98, Nineteen and
24" etc, now passé I think.   I don't say that, and doubt that anyone
younger does, either.
>
>Do you know why they decided to replace convention with something unusual?
Change for the sake of change, the result of some Ed-school fad? :-)
>
>> Well, when I was in school, I was taught that "and" goes for the decimal
point:
>> four thousand and nine [tenths].
Usually "and" for fractions, "point" for decimals; simple decimals, like
".5" could be read either way, five-tenths or point-five.
As to the usage that set off this whole thread:  "four thousand nine" in
English can only mean 4009.
>
>This sounds quite dangerous, if we can't all agree on how to use
>numbers...
Truly!