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

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Thursday, January 24, 2002, 19:23
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!