Two-ty

[davidn]

Once again I've been going through the archive of DVDs converted from old tapes that my parents sent to me, and uploading the best bits to Youtube - one of my recent finds is an episode of Junior Maths, a programme presented by our lord and master Fred Harris that demonstrated maths concepts using often quite hallucinogenic computer graphics.

The problem happens almost exactly 45 seconds into that video. Previously I'd been quietly proud of being part of an era where things weren't dumbed down for children, but why in the name of Oliver Postgate do they called the number 20 "two-ty"? Now that I remember it I'm fairly certain they did this with 30 and 10 (one-ty one, one-ty two...) as well. I can't think of any reason to favour stretching the words to fit an artificial pattern like that over calling the numbers by their actual names, unless they were trying to subtly implant a more logical numbering system into our brains. Did anything else around that era do this?

Comments

[queenmartina.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I didn't imagine this! I remember as a child questioning the idea of 'one-ty' and 'two-ty', and for aeons had wondered where this had come from! :-O

As far as I'm aware, Junior Maths was the only guilty programme, unless Fred decided to inject some of his characteristic zany humour into the likes of Micro Live! :-D

[memberd.livejournal.com]

Fab! yes the two-ty thing stirs up a distant memory. Love the stab at multi-cultural-ness with the counting in different languages (as long as you know yer flags you're OK) - probably where Kraftwerk got their inspiration from for 'Numbers' LOL.