That would be my grandchild, Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky — what a string of names! — who is (decimal) 20 today. For OEAZ on the occasion, this tiny poem:
One score for Opal
Vigesimal 10, the first day of
Her second score —
No longer a teen, now in
Her 20s —
The crowds cheer
Her breakthrough
Now, since I’m irremediably a linguist, a dip into the noun score in games and the measure noun score ’20 years; 2 decades’, which are listed together in dictionaries because, surprisingly, they have the same origin.
A lexicographic moment. From NOAD:
noun score: 1 [a] the number of points, goals, runs, etc. achieved in a game or by a team or an individual [b] informal an act of gaining a point, goal, or run in a game…. 2 a group or set of twenty or about twenty … ORIGIN late Old English scoru ‘set of twenty’, from Old Norse skor ‘notch, tally, twenty’, of Germanic origin; related to shear.
Wait, wait, you cry out, what the hell do notches, tallies, and the number 20 have to do with one another? The OED to the rescue:
presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a score or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next 20
I know, this is one of those genuine etymological stories that encourage people to believe that any sufficiently detailed tale, however preposterous it might seem at first hearing, could be a real word history. But this one actually makes sense. To start with, real shepherds and cowherds have been described tallying their animals in just this fashion, using notches or scores in wood as an aid to memory; compare the practice of counting by 5s, using strokes on paper to keep track of the count.
Come, mister tally man, tally me bananas. From Wikipedia:
Tally marks, also called hash marks, are a form of numeral used for counting. They can be thought of as a unary numeral system.
They are most useful in counting or tallying ongoing results, such as the score in a game or sport, as no intermediate results need to be erased or discarded. … Notched sticks, known as tally sticks, were also historically used for [counting large numbers].
… Tally marks are typically clustered in groups of five for legibility. The cluster size 5 has the advantages of (a) easy conversion into decimal for higher arithmetic operations and (b) avoiding error, as humans can far more easily correctly identify a cluster of 5 than one of 10.
Three schemes for tallying by 5s on paper: left to right: tally marks representing the numbers 1 through 5, as used in most of Europe, the Anglosphere, and Southern Africa; tallying by forming the 5-stroke Chinese character 正; the corresponding tally marks used in France, Portugal, Spain, and their former colonies, including Latin America
March 4, 2024 at 5:19 pm |
Thank you arnold.