BTW, the final chapter of Dodie Smith’s novel 101 Dalmatians, on which the movies were based, is called “The One Hundred and Oneth Dalmatian”.
I’ve never heard this before at all.
Prescriptivists. The early 20th century was their heyday. (It was also the high water mark of European imperialism, coincidentally(?).) Some of those who had been schooled by prescriptivists, which was the norm around 100 years ago, retained that drilling all their life and passed it on to younger generations. It has now been dying down for a long time, being replaced by descriptivism.
Hard prescriptivists insisted that the linguistic laws they spoke forth are absolute and immutable for everybody. Soft prescriptivists, without seeking to promulgate such a totalitarian ideal, would hold to a prescriptivist writing or speaking standard for the purposes of pedagogy in their classroom.
I’m similar to what you described. I use that construction you cited for writing checks—but who talks like how they write checks? Two completely different linguistic registers.
Except that when the sum is an even dollar amount, I don’t bother writing “and no/100,” I just draw a wavy line from the dollar amount to the preprinted word “dollars.”
Yep, it’s weird, but some people insist on it. There was a link in a related recent thread to this.
Like I said, I can’t recall a time I’ve ever encountered that to be the case in actual usage, but many misguided grammar/usage pedants insist it’s the case.
I wonder if maybe the usage is a over-generalizing from such constructions as “one and a half” and “two and five-sixteenths” and other fractional examples, where the “and” is necessary to separate the two parts of the mixed number and avoid ambiguity.
Philistines. It should be “Seven score and sixteen.” Or, if you are somewhat uncouth, “thirteen dozen.”
How about a gross and a dozen?
Doesn’t really matter. Provided the meaning comes across.
Here in Oz:
156 - ‘One Hundred and Fifty-six’
100.56 - ‘One Hundred point five Six’
100 56/100 - ‘One Hundred and 56 Hundredths’
I wonder why we only do it with the numbers from 0 to 100 when preceded by a larger order of magnitude.
For example:
56 - ‘Fifty Six’ - not ‘Fifty and six’
156 - covered
1056 - ‘One Thousand and Fifty Six’
1100 - One Thousand, one hundred’ - not ‘One Thousand and One Hundred’
1156 - One Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty Six’.
And we get irate when ‘immigrants can’t learn our language properly’!
True Dinks Walla, well said.
American. I never use “tenths”, “hundreths”, etc. I would say “A hundred and fifty six out of a hundred.”
I believe in archaic english (and modern German, iirc) from 21-99 it’s standard to put the smaller digit first with an “and”, so 125 is “one hundred five and twenty”. Not really that relevant, but interesting.
No, I’ve only heard that twice in my life: in my 7th and 8th grade math classes. Who were adamant that “and” is only properly used for decimals. Everybody else, including math and science teachers were happy to just use “point” and then a list of a few single digit numbers (followed by “yada yada yada” or “and so on” if there are more or infinite digits) for decimals, with “and” being used for numbers up to 99 following a value greater than or equal to 100. In my physics classes it was very common to just hear “Fifteen point five six meters per second” or similar, same with statistics and so on.
Besides, “and” starts to break down when you begin to work with very small, very precise, or irrational numbers. Nobody is going to spend the time to parse “1.56789345211” into “one and one hundred-billiionth, one ten-billionth, two billionths, five hundred-millionths, four ten-millionths, three millionths, nine hundred-thousandths, eight ten-thousandths, seven thousandths, six hundreths, five tenths.” Which is what my old math worksheets would have me do. You’ll be understood much better if you just say “One point five six seven eight nine three four five two one one”. So that’s what we do.
Or, perhaps, people just have different dialects. I’m perfectly well aware with how I “should” do it, as mentioned. I just think whoever came up with that “proper” way can shove it. If they want to use it and it makes sense to them and their peers, great, me and pretty much everyone else I’ve ever known will go do our own thing over here.
Not that I often write checks, but, once. Of course, that’s because checks aren’t natural language and have a specific, prescribed method for filling them out that only includes one “and”.
Yes, I say “a hundred and forty dollars”, I also say “a hundred and forty dollars <audible comma> and twenty five cents”.
This is not me deluding myself, this is how I parse those values into my head when I read them.
Would you say ‘A hundred and three out of eight’ for 100 3/8? or would you say ‘three eighths’.
I guess I was merely highlighting that if there was a decimal point, the standard (at least around here) is to say ‘point something’ - while if there is a fraction, then we use ‘-ths’.
I guess I jumped the gun. I do use “tenths” for fractions. I think I use “ths” up to about twenty. Anything over twenty, though, I generally use “x out of y”, unless it’s a modifier of another number like “for one one-hundredth of the cost”.
Right. Just because some–or even most–Brits do it doesn’t mean no Americans do.
No doubt that was done for effect (I think it should have been “The One Hundred and First Dalmatian” - although that also looks wrong written down), but nonetheless, “One hundred and one” is completely standard and commonplace (I hesitate to say universal, but it probably is) British usage.
Ah, the difference with the colloquial American English I grew up with is that we say “a hundred” rather than “one hundred.” Teachers tried to get us to say “one hundred;” when the teachers weren’t around we always said “a hundred.”
That’s pretty much the same here in Britain - it’s the AND thing that’s different.
And I think that’s even somewhat understating how common it is, at least in my American dialect, to throw the “and” in there. Nobody would look askance or think it weird to say “and” in a number like “a/one hundred and fifty six.” For me, it is completely natural to throw the “and” in, and I did not grow up with any British English influence. I was just googling phrases like “one hundred and,” “two hundred and,” “three hundred and” with “lyrics” and there’s a slew of American songs out there that use the construction.
Some American speakers may use “and” – reference my 7th-grade math teacher mentioned earlier – but apparently all Brits do. And they’ll make fun of Americans like me who don’t as an example of the destruction of the language.
There’s no ambiguity there. 100 and 1 dalmatians is the same thing as 101 dalmatians. The problem arises more when the numbers are used as nouns.
The decimal problem is not what a lot of you seem to think. It’s not that saying one hundred and one might be misinterpreted as 100.1. It’s that having multiple "and"s in a number can make things unclear. If I said “one hundred and two tenths,” do I mean 100.2 or 102/10? With a rule that the and means a decimal point, the 100.2 is the unambiguous answer.
That said, I voted for the second option in the poll not because of the word “and,” but because it used the number “one.” I am not aware of anyone who would read that number without the “one,” even if they left out the word “hundred.”
Conversationally, “a hundred and fifty six”, or “one hundred and fifty six” if I was being a bit more formal.
Not having the “and” is one of those things that always very sounds distinctly American to my ears. Like hearing maths called “math”. I almost couldn’t say the phrase “one hundred fifty six” out loud without hamming up a bad American accent.