If you live at 4690 Special Street, do you live at "four thousand six hundred ninety" or do you live at "forty-six ninety"? Chances are you've never said your address the first way. Why do we say numbers like this?
If it's a hotel room, I understand. The first two digits usually indicate the floor but for a house address or a telephone number is it just a shortcut to say the number that way?
What if you got a $4690 tax return? Would you exclaim, "Heck yes, I just got forty-six ninety back from the government, drinks are on me!" We don't seem to divide up numbers if it's currency-related.
Oh, and what's with the number zero being pronounced as the letter 'O' when calling out a series of digits like a phone number? It's never an O, it's a zero. That I don't understand either.
And yet I say and do these things too. No wonder English is such a difficult language to learn.
The Big Boy Update: "It stops it." Pronouns can be tricky, but at twenty-five months he can make a distinction between two different items and can refer to both of them with the correct pronoun in a sentence. Last night he said, "it stops it" referring to one piece of plastic that was in the way of another piece of plastic (his car) he was driving down a third piece of plastic (a makeshift hill.)
The Tiny Girl Update: Dress with pants. She has gotten to the age where she looks great in little dresses with coordinating pants underneath. She got several of these types of outfits for Christmas and her birthday and they suit her well as she walks around all day long investigating this and climbing on that.
Fitness Update: 5.5 miles with Uncle Jonathan. We both are getting over this long, drawn-out cold flu funk and didn't feel great, but we made it to the bridge in the park and back.
Someone Once Said: The world is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.
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