Timeline for Why are two-digit numbers in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) written in "German style"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 27, 2019 at 21:28 | comment | added | David | Not to mention the four-and-twenty virgins who made a more recent journey from the Highlands. | |
| Apr 23, 2019 at 8:09 | vote | accept | wfgeo | ||
| Apr 23, 2019 at 8:09 | |||||
| Apr 22, 2019 at 10:58 | comment | added | pjc50 | @JamesRandom the relationship with pre-decimal currency was different: "two and six" meant two shillings and sixpence. | |
| Apr 22, 2019 at 9:34 | comment | added | Michael Harvey | @Philip Wood - my mother, born 1920 in London, used to say "five-and-twenty" past, or to, an hour, but my father, born the same year in Derby, said "twenty-five". The usage was confined to times only. Nobody said "three-and-forty shillings". | |
| Apr 22, 2019 at 9:31 | comment | added | Michael Harvey | "Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" | |
| Apr 21, 2019 at 16:31 | comment | added | user323578 | I mainly remember it being used for numbers between 20 and 30, but it may have also been used less frequently for things like "5 and 90". (This could also be related to the appallingly complicated pre-decimal currency in use at the time.) | |
| Apr 21, 2019 at 14:10 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Can you clarify what “for some numbers” means? I don’t suppose they went around counting sixty-one, two and sixty, sixty-three – which type(s) of numbers would tend to have the Germanic order as more likely variants? | |
| Apr 21, 2019 at 13:11 | comment | added | Philip Wood | "This was quite common (for some numbers) among my parents' generation when I was young". That is my experience, too (in the UK). Times of day were often given like this, e.g. "five and twenty past three". | |
| Apr 21, 2019 at 12:12 | history | answered | user323578 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |