A Janusian poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1664049]

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Two Thousand Eleven

WRONG WRONG WRONG Americans.

> Now that they're over, the previous decade will be referred to as...

You forgot to ask people whether they think the decade ended last Saturday or last year...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oops, my mistake on the second point.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Not as wrong as "Twenteleven" which is the other variant I've heard.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Question: How is it any more wrong than Brits saying "Twenty one" rather than "Twenty-and-one" (like they do in France)?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Or indeed, 'Four hundred twenty and one' like they do in France. Though in France it's only the -1 that gets an 'and'. It's 'vingt-deux'.

But it just is! :p

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I call arbitrary and pointless. There's nothing more wrong with 'Two thousand eleven' than there is with 'aluminum'.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

That's enough from you, Yank! :-P

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Okay, 'aluminum' is patently at least odd because most other metals end in 'ium'.

Second, 'thirty-four' works that way because the 'thirty' is a single word. If we said 'three tens' it would have to be 'three tens and four'. Hence why it has to be 'two hundred and ...'. There seems to me to be a logic there based on how the words work.

[andrewducker]

Althought not platinum, molybdenum or tantalum. And it was produced from alumina, so I can understand why it was originally aluminum, but also why the official name changed later.

I agree with you on X hundreds and blah - it's clearly a list.
"Three thousands, four hundreds, and fifty-six ones" - only slightly cut down.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

So why not cut it down further still? No reason not to.

[andrewducker]

I say what I feel comfortable with. I'm happy for other people to do likewise too :->

I'd be likely to say Twenty-Ten, for instance, purely because that would occur to me first. But if someone else said Two Thousand And Ten or Two Thousand Ten, I don't think I'd blink.

(But I've now been thinking about this for two hours, so I'm uncertain of what I would have done before that, or what I will do given a few days to forget about it.)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I thought it was to do with listiness, but as I probably didn't explain well, I think it's because 'fifty' is a word but 'four hundred' is not.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

If it's a list, why is the "and" only ever applied if there are tens/ones present? Why is the number 154,200 not expressed as "one hundred fifty-four thousand and two hundred?" And why do people use "and" between the hundred thousands and the ten thousands and thousands? To wit, why do people express the previous number as "one hundred AND fifty-four thousand, two hundred." If there's supposed to be a rationale behind the usage of "and," then it doesn't seem to be applied consistently at all.

marrog is right: this is about custom, not about meaning. In fact, I'll just quote what I wrote in another discussion on this topic:

"And all of this is entirely aside from the fact that this is fundamentally a language issue and language doesn't always make as much sense as people want it to. Language isn't math, people, even when you're saying numbers. It has rules, but those rules aren't always logical or consistent. It's custom to use the 'and' or not when expressing numbers. It presence or absence does not fundamentally change the meaning of the expression unless one party is so utterly unfamiliar with one usage that it confuses them (or is being deliberately obtuse to score points on the internet)."

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Like platinum?

Aluminium was originally named aluminum to be etymologically consistent with the oxide alumina (lanthana is the oxide of lanthanum, magnesia is the oxide of magnesium). Some dude changed it because he thought Aluminium 'sounded better'. Not really much of an excuse for going against the established and sensible convention. Aluminium, both historically and etymologically, ought to be called aluminum. Just like if rugby is rugby, football ought to be called soccer. Americans aren't always wrong just because they're American. Only different.

And the same goes for two thousand eleven. It's a different convention from the one we use and might initially seem ungrammatical, but the grammar is completely arbitrary to start with - we do lots of things in the English language that don't actually make grammatical sense - for example the use of pleonastic 'it' which lots of language don't have at all, same as any other language (hello grammatical gender).

By our rules 'two thousand eleven' seems wrong. But then, in 1800 double negatives were only ungrammatical in the South East of England. Stuff changes. We don't always like it (I usually don't), but there ain't nothing we can do about it.

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Americans aren't always wrong just because they're American

Not sure if I'd rather have this embroidered on a pillow or tattooed on my arm....

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

I'd propose to you for this, except Erin might take it wrong. Thank you!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Aluminium started off being called "alumium" (thus keeping the -ium suffix). The 'n' was later added (giving -um), and finally the 'u' (returning it to -ium). However, while 'aluminium' was the official spelling for some time in America, some guy who was selling it referred to it as "aluminum" on his flyers (possibly a typo), and the name stuck in America, but not here.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I think my point was that it doesn't actually matter.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

> Two Thousand Eleven

WRONG WRONG WRONG Americans.

First reaction: why so emphatic?

Second reaction: if he gets that worked up over something that trivial, I probably don't want to know.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Long story, but I often have to deal with americans who blithely assume that I know how to read dates like 12/25/2010, work in their wacky units, know what their timezones are and so on, and don't seem to get it into their heads that not everyone is part of their culture. Winds me up.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

I don't find this specific to Americans; most people tend to assume the world revolves around their own country's national peculiarities and forget to think that other people might not have the same default settings (which is unsurprising, as they're default settings and taken for granted). Some people are better at not making these assumptions than others but I've found it to be a universal problem.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I've found that Brits assume that Foreigners will be Weird and Unfamiliar. They are in ignorance, but at least have knowledge of it. My family in France, like the Americans it must be said, blithely assume everyone is the same as them -- my grandmother used to regularly ask, to the infuriation of my mother, about my Bac exams which of course I did not have.

But Americans do it in a particularly annoying way, and in jobs where they are in CONSTANT CONTACT with people from other countries, and still manage not to be struck with the clue stick.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Brits deal with more foreigners than America; it's an unfortunate geographical fact that America is isolated. Also huge, so it's hard to get a sense that there's a big world out there, because it's so big itself.

And clarification: I realize that Americans frequently do things that actively inconvenience you regarding time zones, but having different speech patterns and customs? Not wrong, just different.

Anyway, whatever; I'm clearly not the best person to talk to you on this subject.