- Thus The Times
The actual number was 80. It said so in paragraph two. It's a lot simpler, though, to refer to 80 as an unspecified multiple of 20, presumably on the basis of marking a notch in a stick when attempting to count sheep. Explanation here.
Incidentally, 43,000 sheep drowned yesterday, which means 2,150 score.
Even more incidentally, the French used to have a word huitant before shifting to quatre vingt or four score. It was also of course Abraham Lincoln's preferred method of counting. Why say 87 when four score and seven will do?
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The French quatre-vingt was probably a borrowing from Celtic. Some kinds of French, like Walloon, use the terms septante and nonante.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention in the post that the only interesting moment in the film Jules et Jim is when he gives a phone number including the word huitant (French phone numbers are always given in pairs of digits). So maybe the word survived into 1960s Parisian criminal slang.
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