Counting with letters

The numerals we use were popularized in Europe by Leonardo Fibonacci. We have some evidence (in the form of a date on a sign on a coal mine or something mundane like that) that our numerals were known in Europe before 1202, but Fibonacci generally gets the credit for popularizing them. Here’s a cleaned-up chart of the originals:

They used the number of angles in the figures as a mnemonic

Before that, we had Roman Numerals, of course, but what did we use to count with before the Romans? We used letters.

Before I tell you how that works, I must mention numerology. Numerology is the practice of assigning numerical values to letters, counting up the sum, and looking for interesting patterns in the numbers you get. The most common way nowadays it to assign the values 1 through 26 to the letters of the English alphabet. Numerologists manipulate results pretty much at will; consequently you can prove anything you like with numerology if you work at it. It’s a bunch of hokum. I even figured out how to prove that I, your humble curmudgeon, am the antichrist! Ask me how and I’ll tell you. It’s all very clear, and completely bogus.

Since at least the Greeks and the Hebrews actually did use letters (other groups had a pile of other systems), you can assign a numerical value to a word. When the Greeks were actually counting, they put a mark at the corner of the letter to show that it was being used as a numeral. But they didn’t go from 1 to 26 (okay, 24) in assigning the values. First, here’s a Greek alphabet.

Lowercase letters came later

Numbers, like musical terms and place names, tends to be conservative linguistically, and that leads to a monkey wrench. Between epsilon and zeta, when you’re counting, you have to insert an obsolete letter called a digamma. The digamma looks like a capital F, and it stands for six. Keep counting, and you get to iota standing for ten. Kappa is 20, not eleven. Lambda is 30, and so on, until you get to the next monkey wrench between pi and rho. In goes another obsolete letter, qof, which looks like a lollipop, and it stands for 90. Hence, rho is 100. Sigma is 200, and so on. I don’t know of a letter for 900, and they used a word for a thousand, related to our word myriad. So if you want to say you have 23 sheep, you would use kappa gamma with a mark after the two letters.

Obviously, with a system like this you can assign values to actual Greek words pretty easily. Look up the numerical values and add them up. It’s from this practice that we get the expression “the number of a name.”

And having used that expression, I have to bring up the book of Revelation and the number of the beast. What I described above is how you get to the infamous 666. You have a few problems figuring out who he is, though.

• It’s easy to get from a word to a number, but hard to get from a number to a word. Try it.
• What language do you use? Classical Greek? Modern Greek? Hebrew? Latin? Aramaic? Italian? King James English? Whatever language the beast speaks?
• What name do you use? First name? Title? Whole name? Last name? Maybe his secret name. How about nickname? Or the name his opponents call him?

Obviously it’s going to be hard to figure out who the guy is in advance, and plenty of people have figured out plenty of ways to assign 666 to a lot of famous folks enemies. My recommendation: make it into a party game. Use something like the Greek method on the English alphabet, and assign people their numbers accordingly. Make up some rules, such as the higher your number the more intelligent (or some other desirable characteristic) you are. Perhaps the closer your numbers are, the more compatible, and you can add the number of your pet’s name to bring your numbers closer together. Married people who have the same last name would be very compatible.

The sky’s the limit.

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A pretentiousism is when you use a fancier word than you need, particularly when you use that fancy word incorrectly. One of my favorite such words to hate consists of the compose/comprise dichotomy.

I’m reading A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss. It’s a book on cosmology written to literate (read interested in cosmology) laypeople. So far the book has been a nice review of a lot of material about cosmology that I’ve already read, and it pulls some things together for me. On page 113 I ran into a nice correct use of “comprise,” and I decided to share it with you. Remember, “comprise” goes between the whole and its parts, in that order. It’s a rather long sentence; bear with me until you get near the end.

It is worth repeating the implications of this remarkable agreement more forcefully: Only in the first seconds of a hot Big Bang with an initial abundance of protons and neutrons that would result in something very close to the observed density matter in visible galaxies today, and a density of radiation that would leave a remnant that would correspond precisely to the observed intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation today, would nuclear reactions occur that could produce precisely the abundance of light elements, hydrogen and deuterium, helium, and lithium, that we infer to have comprised the basic building blocks of the stars that now fill the night sky.

The part that I’m interested in is “…the abundance…that we infer to have comprised the building basic building blocks…” The abundance (the whole thing) comprises the blocks (plural, parts). A complicated sentence, but he got it right.

However, the book is good for more than a good example. On page 114 I found this poor misshapen gem:

When 60 percent of the visible matter in the universe is comprised of helium, there will be no necessity for production of primordial helium in a hot Big Bang in order to produce agreement with observation.

The universe will be 60% composed of helium, or if you prefer, the universe will be made up of 60% helium. (Best is to avoid the whole issue: the universe is 60% helium).
Dr. Krauss is hardly someone I’d accuse of being pretentious, but it’s fun to catch the smart guys once in a while, too.

One of the denser illustrations in the book

To be fair, Dr. Krauss uses “comprise” correctly at least twice more, in consecutive sentences, no less. Repetition is the mother of learning, so I’ll quote them here so you can practice seeing how the word is used correctly.

More recently, however, universe has come to have a simpler, arguably more sensible meaning. It is now traditional to think of “our” universe as comprising simply the totality of all that we can now see and all that we could ever see. Physically, therefore, our universe comprises everything that either once could have had an impact upon us or that ever will.

I leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to work out that these usages are correct.

Maybe not absolutely never, but hardly ever. (What’s that line in The Mikado? “What never? No, never. What never? Well, hardly ever!”)

I was a sales trainer in another life. For the United States Chamber of Commerce, no less.  One of the things I taught my trainees never to say in a presentation was these two phrases:  ”I want” and “let me.” By the way, did you notice that I wrote “was these two phrases?” That’s a singular verb, and “two phrases” is a plural. What gives? Re-read the sentence, and you will realize that the subject is the first word in the sentence, a singular. The two phrases were a single lesson. I admit the sentence is somewhat awkward, having the subject and verb so far apart, but it’s a good example of being alert about subject-verb agreement.

I want to show you our new product. Let me show you how wonderful it is.

Nothing will brand you as a pushy salesperson more quickly than those two pairs of words.

Now the third thing you should never say: “I’d like.”

I’d like to thank you all for reading my blog.

Don’t say that you’re going to say something, just say it!

Thank you for reading The Writing Rag. Knowing that you spend your valuable time here strongly motivates me to produce the best material I can.

Cleaner, crisper, more direct, more sincere, less work for your reader, and you’re doing something, not merely promising to do it. Don’t say you’d like to do something unless something is preventing you from doing it.

Here’s an example of someone using “I’d like” correctly:

My thanks to John Hambrock, who writes The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee.

I’d like to post a link to the comic, but I’m not sure it works.

Lots of people have trouble with the phrase “different from.” Commonly they write “different than.” So what’s the difference? Both forms have been used a lot (and in England they say “different to.” Gak.) Bartleby says “different from” is the only one that nobody says is wrong.  Rather like nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee. “Different from” functions as an adjective, though. You use it when you compare substantives (words that are like nouns, including nouns, pronouns, and gerunds).  So you can say, for example,

A husband’s method of doing something might be different from his wife’s method of doing the same thing.

But what if you’re comparing verbs? Then you need an adverb! The adverb is “differently. ”

I happen to be reading The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. My wife and I are planning to read it together, but I got a little head start. (I hope there’s also a book about the proper care and feeding of wives, but to tell the truth, neither of us has much of a complaint about the other, but I digress.) The book has excellent English, some of the cleanest I have seen in a book in a while, and this morning I ran into the sentence that led to this post. Dr. Schlessinger does a nice job with “differently,” so I’m going to share it with you.

Wives need to remind themselves that when their husbands do something differently from how they would do it themselves, it does not constitute a breach of sanity or a display of contempt.

Note the correct use of “from.” Nice. You can tell what verbs are being compared, right?

Dr. S, posed differently from how I would expect. Yup, the pose is different from the usual one.

Ladies, (so far, anyway) I recommend the book as a source of some good ideas about how you might treat your hubby differently from how you might be treating him, and to everyone, I recommend the book for the good grammar.

I’m reading The Journey of Man by Spencer Wells, and I ran into a nice example of allusion. An allusion is when the writer refers to something that’s not in the current context. It presumes some outside knowledge on the part of the reader. Chapter 3, on page 50, starts with a famous quote from Gloria Steinem, which, by the way is a simile.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicyle.

This section of the book describes features of mitochondrial DNA, transmitted through the female line, and stretches of DNA on the Y chromosome, transmitted only through males. They produce independent histories of the human genome, so they can be used to corroborate one another. Anyway, read on until you reach page 71. About the middle of the page you run into this passage.

It is literally a ‘journey of man’, but it is the best tool we have for inferring the details of the trip. It is obviously important to examine the female lineage to see if it follows the same pattern – to make sure the fish stays with the bicycle, so to speak – but the Y-chromosome does provide us with the cleanest distillation of human migrational history.

—A reference to something either in well-known feminist literature or a quote 20 pages earlier in the book, take your pick.

Sorry about the sexist humor. That's a Y chromosome on the left, X chromosome on the right.

Gloria must know a lot of fish who like bicycles.