Lesson 4

“Numeracy”

Numbers. You’d think they’re easy enough: you learn to count from 1 (one) to 10 (ten). You learn to count till 100 (a hundred). You learn it up to the thousands, millions and so on.

The first problem arises when you have to tell someone your date of birth. In England, it goes like day/month/year. The day is alright. You certainly know how to count to 31, ey? Don’t forget it’s ordinal, though, like 13th. And don’t forget the emphasis! Like Thir-TEEN-th and THIR-ty-ETH. It’s very easy to be misheard or mishear it.

Next, the month is alright. You either tell’em the number, e.g. the fifth, or the name, like May.

Then comes the black soup (as I would say). The year. If you’re a complete beginner, you would obviously say: one thousand and nine hundred and…

Yeah, that’s bloody long in English. The very first thing with being English is to hate words that take up more than one syllable. (I’m not being funny here! Just have a look at their names: Pete, Chris, Gill, Vick etc. All shortened to one syllable.) If a number is above 1000 (a thousand), they break it apart like: nineteen-eighty (which is 1980) or nineteen-ninety-nine (1999).

And it’s like a madness, really. How would you put 1100, then? You owe me a pint: eleven-hundred. (Hmm… original.)

Had to learn it on me own skin, really. We was gonna buy a car. I phoned this bloke and we went to see his car. My mate didn’t really want to spend more than 500 quid. But the bloke says it’s seven hundred. My friend was going like, “I’ll give you five hundred.” The bloke started to look funny. He went, “I don’t really wanna go under four hundred.” I was like, “What? My mate just said FIVE hundred!” Then he went on and I realised that he was saying “fourTEEN hundred!” The bleeding car was not for 700 but for 1700 quid! Stupid buggers. Call something “hundred” when it’s a way above a thousand…