THE EASY WAY TO CONFUSE

I was having a cup of tea with my Californian friend Heidi recently and we got talking about numbers. According to an expert in dyslexia, I have maths dyslexia. I muddle up numbers, say them back to front and often forget my PIN. I find it hard to remember my telephone number which my friend tells me is a no no in the modern world. I can now just about remember it but always have to check to make sure.

We then talked about the French way of counting which for me, is more than puzzling. One to ten is a breeze but the French don’t have the concept of teens. They start off echoing the earlier numbers. The number 3 is trois, 13 is treize; 4 is quatre, 14 quatorze so you can see that there’s a connection. But while 5 is cinq, 15 is quinze.

And then, to confuse me even more, they say dix-sept for 17 (ten plus seven), dix-huit for 18 and dix-neuf for 19. You might make a guess that the word for twenty bears some relation to two (deux) but that would be too easy. It’s vingt. After that the numbers are straight forward until we get to 70.

For 70, 80 and 90, French speaking Belgians use the words septante, huitante (or octante) and nontante which apparently the French did until the 16^th century. But then the French Academy decreed they should be soixante-dix, (60-10) quatre-vingts (four twenties) and quatre-vingt-dix (four twenties and ten.) This is probably because the ancient Gauls counted in twenties. The English also did occasionally. People used to say that the allotted life span was three score years and ten.

As we sipped our tea and I said I was always amused how my mother and aunts said their phone numbers. 74333226 might seem easy. My family, however, said: ‘seven four, treble three double two six.’ Heidi said the Brits love using trebles. It just served to confuse me even more.

My father also had a number idiosyncrasy when talking about the time. Unlike most people in the twentieth century, he would not say ‘twenty-five to four’ but ‘five and twenty to four.’ Maybe he just liked the sound of it. He also stood on one leg to put on his watch but more of that another time.

‘It’s five and twenty to six. Time for tea.’

Either Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde (there is no authoritative source) said, something like, ‘The British and Americans are one people separated by a common language.’

There’s a lot of truth in this. Let’s look at how easy it is to confuse while talking about an ordinary day using American and British English words.

One autumn/fall morning I woke up with a headache, filled a glass from the tap/faucet and nibbled on a biscuit/cookie while I surveyed the remains of the party. There was rubbish/trash everywhere, empty bottles of booze/liquor on the floor and bowls of crisps/chips on the table. I put on my trousers/pants, went out of the flat/apartment and took the lift/elevator to the ground floor/first floor. I found my car/automobile and saw that someone had hit the bonnet/hood with a hammer and opened the boot/trunk in search of valuables. I wouldn’t be taking the motorway/freeway today. I walked along the pavement/sidewalk and bought some chips/fries on the way to the underground/subway.