Poor math skills are OK?

Favorite blonde joke:

Why couldn't the blond call the police for help?

Couldn't find the "11" on the phone dial.

My stepdaughter is a blonde and most of the jokes fit.

Tom

why do people insist on saying the year as "two thousand and four" (or if you are in America " two thousand four")? I always say twenty oh four, just like we did in the twentieth century, eg nineteen eighty four, nineteen oh four, seventeen seventy six. For some reason everyone is now stating the year as a full number, and not breaking it up into two groups of two digit numbers.

This in turn has got me thinking about why Americans call the Jumbo Jet a seven forty seven, whereas everyone else in the world refers to them as seven four seven....

Tim Brimelow

SLAP... I've been pronouncing it "two hundred four"! DOH!

Except when in Rome of course, where it is pronounced "m-miv" - as if you are the public defender in "My Cousin Vinnie".

And then of course there's Bugtussel and Hooterville where it is simply "tu-dubble naught-four".

Well enough of that, back to work on the eff-four-ewe so I can finish and get started on the eff-fourteen sometime this year. ;-)

WmB

To reply, get the HECK out of there snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net

Because that's the was Boeing referred to it when it came out.

That's how Johnson gave us the SR-71. It was the RS-71 until he announced it to the public and got it bass ackward. Or so I've been told.

Tom

You say 'to-may-toe' and I say 'to-mah-toe', you say 'po-tay-toe' and I say 'po-tah-toe'....

I suspect the nineteen eighty four is a condensed way of saying nineteen hundred eighty four (how would you pronounce 1900, nineteen oh oh, or nineteen hundred?). Therefore, since we don't often say twenty-hundred, but rather two thousand that is the way we say the year. How did Arthur C. Clarke pronounce the name of his famous book and movie? I have always heard it as Two Thousand and One.

Come back in a century, and we should all be on the same page again.

I've heard that too. Seven fortyseven actually makes sense though.

Akin to this is when some people refer to the infamous date of

9-11-01, why do they call it "9-1-1", like they're calling an emergency? The date is 9-11, as in nine-eleven. We don't call Christmas day 12-2-5, (twelve-two-five) do we? Not usually, 'cause it's 12-25!

11/9

11th September

lets call the whole thing golf.

'11/9' will be taken by most in the US as November 9. In fact, it's the default convention for a date in Microsoft Excell if using US preferences. '24/9' would be unambiguous despite not conforming to US convention, but if you tried to render July 24th in the same manner, most of your US readers would assume you meant 'active every hour of every day of the week (24/7).'

As for the notion that 'oh' is an improper spoken rendering of 'zero,' this is almost always has a clear meaning in US usage. The tricky area is where a combination of letters and numerals needs to be recited (as in a VIN, wherein the unambiguous usage is 'letter O' and 'zero.' That said, I doubt the usage 'Twenty-oh-four' is common in the US. All I ever hear is 'Two thousand four,' except for one idiosyncrat who deemed 'Two-oh-oh-four' to be preferable.

Mark Schynert

"jerry 47" wrote

Don't get me wrong - I don't use long division in lieu of a calculator. However, just where does one get this formula to plug into?

KL

Well Tim, I do pronounce it twenty-o-four and some people look at me funny. Screw 'em. Mom still struggles with the whole change-of-century concept. I figure when one attains 91 years of age, cut them some slack. Should I ever make it that far I'll be one surprised ancient being. :)

Bill Banaszak, MFE

snipped-for-privacy@hiwaay.net (jerry 47) wrote in :

Is it just me, or is this "formula" too trivial to talk about? If the scale is 1:n, then scale measurement = (real measurement/n) Of course, that's a bit easier to do with metric than with imperial units, but you should be using metric anyway.

...you say 'Ya-may-toe', I say 'Yamato'... (The "Star Blazers" and Phil Foglio fans among us might get this one...)

Japanese have the right idea eg Christmas

2004-12-25

Indexable!!!!

Hah! That reminds me of a real airplane oil cooler made by an aftermarket manufacturer. There part number, as told to me over the phone one day was "two thousand four", so I wrote down the number "2004". I couple of weeks later I call back to order one & mistakenly tell the girl on the other end that I need a "two-zero-zero-four oil cooler". She proceeds to tell me that that's not a good number, it doesn't come up in the computer. I apologized & told her I must've written it down wrong & gave her the original number to cross reference it to. Her response? "Yep, you left out a zero, it's a two thousand four." This was in the late '90s, BTW. Anyway, I told her that's what I gave her, 2-0-0-4. Oops, I'm so stoopid. Her two thousand four part number is 20004!