Oh my word!

Don and Joe, those cheeky chappies over the pond, spent the week arguing about counting. And well they mi g h t , counting in English can be tricky.

The style of many newspapers (including this one) is to spell numbers under 10 but use digits after that. Spell out eight, but digitise 18. But then you run into exceptions. For time, write 6.35am. Not six 35. And one million is expressed as a word, but add just one more and it’s back to figures: 1,000,001.

Then there’s the hokeycokey of the spoken “and”. Sometimes i t ’s in, sometimes it’s out. When you say 143 (one hundred and forty-three), you need the “and” after the hundred. But when you say 1,143, (one thousand, one hundred and forty-three) you don’t put an “and” between the thousand and the hundred. You don’t do it after tens of thousands but do after hundreds of thousands, then the “and” also returns (briefly) after a million. For 1,000,043 you’d say one million and forty-three. Though you need the “and”, because one million forty-threehree is ambiguous. But youu don’t need any “ands” at alll when writing digits.

You’ ll notice I’vee been hyphenating written numbers under 100. ThisT is a newspaper style thing that has become habit. George Orwell hadd the same habit. The correct title of hiss novel isn’t 1984, it iss Nine teen Eighty

Fo u r. But it is perfectly acceptable to write eighty four.

I get annoyed at apostrophes in decades when written as digits. Again, because it is the way I was taught, I like the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s to have apostrophes denoting the missing 19. But I hate seeing them as the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. What is that apostrophe for?

I find the distinction b e tw e e n ordinal and cardinal numbers rather satisfying. A cardinal number expresses an amount: three, four, or five cats. An ordinal number gives the position in a list: the third, seventh, or ninth cat. But I don’t like ordinal numbers in dates. I’d insist upon November 7, 2020. Again it’s the newspaper obsession for using the least space possible. The extra ink for November the 7th is wasteful.

The exceptions to my space fixation are noon and midnight. I prefer them written out. They need extra space but it might take the reader a bit of working out to decide which of 12.00pm and 12.00am is in daylight.

The main problem with numbers is that, like an American election, there are very few clear rules.

STEVE FINAN IN DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE