WHAT'S IN A NUMBER?

"Please tell me if you can what time do the trains roll in?

    Two-ten, six-eighteen, ten-forty- four.”

           Lyrics by Rod McKuen

I do like numbers. Even the time of day makes me smile if the numbers are familiar, like the ones in those old folk song lyrics above, or my birth month and day, or are in a good set like 7:11 or 12:34. We are surrounded by numbers: phone numbers, pin numbers, numbers games, TV channels, Interstate and highway numbers, merchandise prices and sales discounts, addresses, days and dates, times, and temperatures, 24/7/365, ad infinitum.

We know that mankind must have used numbers, at least in his head and in his speech, from the time he began to think and realize what was out there, what he had, and what he wanted. What was the first numerical thought? It may have been “I see one lion,” or “I have two days’ worth of food.” He had to think in more precise terms than one or many. He realized he had fingers and toes on which to count. Fingers and toes, our first numerical system, are referred to as digits, from their Latin name, digitus. Man started recording numbers as notches on a bone. When man was able to find a bit of leisure to think beyond daily survival, civilization developed. Along with it came ancient formalized numerical systems.

There are many such systems, including those of the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Chinese and Japanese, and others. The system still used for numbering special events, like Super Bowls and Olympic Games, is the Roman system of combining I’s, V’s, X’s, L’s, C’s, D’s, and M’s to designate numbers. How many times have you tried to do a quick translation of the date run at the end of an old movie? One beauty of a date is MDCCCLXXXVIII. Its 13 digits translate to 1888. Add another millennium, add another M. The system supports only basic addition and subtraction: add a letter here, take one away there. Don’t even try to multiply or divide them – the Romans used an abacus for that, as did the Chinese and Russians. Abaci are still in use in many parts of the world.

Several numerical systems had the concept of zero, but in most it was just a vacant position. In some it was depicted as a disc with an empty or vacant center. (Is that familiar?) The Roman system, and many of the other in the world, had no place for zero. The zero and numbers we use today are the legacy to most of the modern world from the Hindu-Arabic system that preserved and further developed the science and mathematics of previous cultures. The Moors brought their knowledge to North Africa and on into Europe, thus we call the numbers Arabic. Mathematicians and scientists soon realized the beauty and utility of the simple numbers. Bankers could calculate interest out to several decimal points, merchants could price their wares effectively, and mathematicians could begin to use the fractions, quadratic equations, and algebra already in use in the Middle East. The next step in numerical system development wouldn’t come until 1679, and the development of the binary system of representing numbers. That development, on hold for a while, eventually led to our modern digital age – there are those digits again.

Fibonacci Numbers

From Pythagoras and Euclid to the modern practitioners, mathematicians have come up with all manner of special numbers like primes, pseudoprimes, and palindromic primes, composite numbers, square roots, perfect numbers, Fibonacci numbers, Cullen numbers, Avogadro’s number, ad infinitum. Speaking of ad infinitum, don’t ever forget the exact number for π – that’s pi. And if you live numbers, as did the late Stephen Hawking, numbers can take you to the universe.

I’m not too mathematically inclined. Over the years, as have most of us, I’ve picked up a bit of trivial numeric knowledge. I do wish that my first Algebra teacher had given us a nutshell history of the whys and wherefores of mathematics beyond simple arithmetic. It might have made the subject more interesting, memorable, and retainable. I had to take Advanced Algebra and Trigonometry in high school, and I do know I passed the courses, but I don’t remember any of the course work. I do best with basic arithmetic and eighth-grade fractions. I’m set for life, math wise: that knowledge of fractions comes in very handy in cooking, and my checkbook always balances.

GHOTI

                               

You know ghoti, don’t you? It’s pronounced ‘fish’ – yes, that’s right:

   Gh as the gh in cough – that would be your f

   O and the o in women – that would be your I or ih

   Ti as the ti in fascination – there’s the sh

Fascination – yes, it’s fascinating to me how words are spelled and pronounced so differently, sometimes so illogically.

In England, Worcestershire is pronounced as Woos-ter-shire or sheer.

Here we pronounce Westchester as Westchester, why don’t we pronounce it as Wester – leaving out the chest. Well, I fully realize that there are precedents for this, but I love to mess with words. The British must always have been in a hurry. They seem to have shortened whatever words they could. Featherstonehaugh is pronounces Fee-ston-hue, Cholmondeley is pronounced Chumley – one syllable less. Dalziel is pronounced Dee-ell. Were they always in a hurry to pronounce the names and get them over and done with?

While I’m rambling on about words, my favorite questionable words are names from China. I know that a according to my favorite Wikipedia:

“Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.” 

But when they were “romanizing” the words, why didn’t they pay attention to the spelling vs the pronunciations. Most readers and speakers of the Roman-based languages would, at first glance, know how to pronounce my favorite Feng Shui. They’d pronounce it as it looks: feng schwee or shooey. But no, it is pronounced fung shway.  So why didn’t they spell it that way? Am I making sense to you? 

Many of the romanizations, like changing Peking to Beijing, still baffle me.

The Chinese government changed it to Beijing when they adopted the Pinyin. Most westerners pronounce it Bay-zhing. It is supposed to be Bay-jing. Hard on that j. O.k. – I get the jing part, but why did they use Bei, not Bay? I’ll never know, and it’s good fodder for a grump session.

And then there was Noah Webster. The teacher in him that was dissatisfied: generally with the state of education in the new Untied States, and specifically with instruction in the English language. He set out to standardize spelling, and for the most part he did a fine job. He changed gaol to jail. He did eliminate the u’s in words like colour and favour, ones we’d now pronounce here as coloor and favoor. We know that works like philosophy and psychology are not filosofy and scicology – it’s because of the Greek or Latin word roots. But why do we have rough, cough, and hiccough? 

“‘Tis a puzzlement!”

THE MARCH KING

What better month to celebrate The March King than July - what would our Independence be without a rousing march or two? This article was posted in this month's issue of our community magazine

“Da, da dee dah-dah, de dah, de dah, de dah.” Of course you recognize the opening bars of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Don’t you? (There’s no way to put those opening bars, plus the cymbals crash, into print. You’ll have to hum to yourself.)

There’s nothing like a stirring march to get our patriotic juices flowing, and there’s nothing like a Sousa march to top them all. John Philip Sousa* was born in 1854 in Washington, D.C. He began with the violin, at age six, and went on to master the piano, the flute, and several brass instruments. He was a natural. His father, a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band, enlisted his son, age 13, in the corps as an apprentice so that he wouldn’t run off and join the circus – the circus band, of course.

After his first stint with the corps ended in 1875, he learned to conduct while he was in a theatre orchestra. Thus, when he rejoined the corps, at the age of 26, it was the leader of the band. He led the Marne Corps Band for twelve more years, after which he left to form his own band. In the years that followed, the Sousa Band performed all over the world. Interestingly though, over all the years, they marched only eight times.

You can sense the concert audiences sitting and tapping their toes to the Sousa marches, but there was other music offered as well. Sousa, The March King, also wrote many popular operettas, dozens of songs, and other pieces such as overtures and suites. Among his 136 marches, though we may not remember their names, the tunes of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “The Washington Post,” “Semper Fidelis,” and “The Thunderer” are familiar to us all.

                                                   

No sousaphones in the Marine Band

In almost every marching band across the country, there is at least one person beholden to Sousa for inventing the sousaphone. A typical concert tuba weighs in at 25 to 35 pounds, and though a sousaphone can weigh just about the same, the tuba’s circumference is several feet. It’s fine for a player to let his chair hold it for him while he plays in the orchestra, but it is a beast to heft if he has to march with it.

Sousa recognized the problem. In 1893, providing ideas about what he needed, he asked Philadelphia instrument maker, J. W. Pepper and Sons, to design a tuba that could be carried. The sousaphone was based on the helicon, a much older but awkward instrument that could also be carried. The sousaphone incorporates different features that make it comfortable for the player to carry, as well as to play.

Though there were once jumbo sousaphones that weighed 60 pounds, the average one weighs 30 to 35 pounds, give or take the weight of the music holder.  And, would you believe it, there are Sousaphones made of fiberglass that weigh only about 15 pounds. No brass there.

Ready to march in the festivities in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, years ago,
this sousaphone-wearing gentleman was the clown of the event.
His eyes were very expressive. 

As Elizabeth Eshelman, a onetime sousaphone player, wrote, “There’s something about a wearable tuba that brings out the—goofy? show-off? animalistic? flamboyant? side of the tubist, and when you consider that one must already have a screw loose to choose to play the tuba, you start to realize that the sousaphone is really its own beast.”  Next time you’re at a football game or a big parade, make note of the antics of the sousaphone players – they’re a fun bunch.

* Don’t believe the wags who’ll try to tell you his surname was So, and that in a patriotic gesture he added the USA to his name. ‘Tain’t so!

DEFINING "FRIEND"

I've saved this picture for years because it shows an Amosandra doll,
one I had and loved way back in the late 40's

Though there are many multi-word, multi-sentence, descriptions for someone you know, for a great language like English, there is sometimes something missing. In Japanese, whole concepts can be embodied in just one word. Like all the Inuit words for snow and ice, we need a series of single words to describe the people in our lives, especially those we know only from brief encounters.

Do you remember Joan Walsh Anglund’s book A Friend is Someone Who Likes You? If that is true – that a friend is someone who likes you - then many people have many friends. We like most people we meet. We’d like to have a lot of friends, but are they really friends? If you like the gal who regularly checks out your purchases at the supermarket, is she your friend? Not likely. An acquaintance? Well, maybe. We’re acquainted with many people in the community, but it’s quite a long way from acquaintance to friend. If asked “Do you know Susie-Q,” an acquaintance from club meetings, you might not be able to answer “Yes, she’s a friend of mine,” because it could lead to more questions than you have the knowledge to answer. In that instance, you might just have to say – “Yes, I know who she is.”

I believe we can know who our own friends are by having the relationship pass a test or two – do you trust them, do you love them, would you discuss your health with them, would you discuss your marriage with them?

Further questions wouldn’t arise if we had more precise labels for the way we know folks. Well, most of us seniors like to gab anyway, so it might not be necessary to be brief. Besides which, it might lead to a good, perhaps juicy, conversation about the person in question.