In my neck of the woods, using the “and” would be considered a mark of poor education. It would be right up there with pronouncing “ask” as “aks.” And for whatever reason it’s a personal peeve of mine; it just sets my teeth on edge. I’m stunned to see how many people actually consider this normal.
ETA: In Riemann’s example
We’d say:
105 = one hundred five
105.75 = one hundred five and seventy-five hundredths
105 3/4 = one hundred five and three quarters
Where, as a matter of interest? I have heard both variants frequently in the U.S., and I didn’t think either variant was associated with level of literacy, but perhaps this is a regional thing?
Your comments show how cautious we must be in ascribing social or educational status to people from the way they speak.
ETA: I see that Disney’s original U.S. poster for 101 Dalmatians spells it out with “and”.
I am pretty sure I would drop dead on the spot if I ever heard anyone read that that way in the wild, and I sure wouldn’t consider them well educated.
Point seven five (or whatever the actual digits are) is the rule (like, the Rule, taught in school, not just traditional) for reading a decimal point - converting it to a fraction would be completely bizarre, save for things like reading .25 as ‘a quarter’, .5 as ‘a half’, or .75 as ‘three quarters’. Or, when precision isn’t important, rounding .1 or .9 to the nearest whole number, or .3 or .6 to the nearest third. Even money would be read as a whole number of cents, not a fraction of a dollar (or pound, or euro), except very occasionally for quarter or half dollars.
Irrational numbers, or repeating decimals, would make this reading…very inconvenient.
Other.
American.
I use the and when speaking.
I do not use it in writing. Simple.
Bolding mine
Good heavens! To me, this jars on my ear.
How would you pronounce this pretty accurate approximation of Pi?
3.1416
The “AND is for a decimal point” thing probably comes from money. One hundred and five dollars and fifty cents. Or, one hundred five dollars and fifty cents.
Just for fun, I just looked up “hundred” in the American English section of Google ngram. Before about 1900 nearly everyone uses “and”. So “don’t do this” is not really a law of long standing
I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone say “and seventy-five hundredths,” at least not in the wild—unless you count “and seventy-five cents” as being essentially the same thing.
In the case of fractions that have their own name, I think sometimes people say “and” and sometimes they don’t:
“Eight pounds (and) seven ounces”
“Five feet (and) seven inches” (vs. “five foot seven and a half inches”)
“Four hours (and) fifteen minutes”
I tend to omit the and. I definitely don’t use it in writing, and when I saw the thread title I immediately thought no and. I’m from SE Ohio, originally.
I don’t feel like this is a regionalism in the US, though I could be wrong. I feel like this is something that’s always pretty fluid.
This is how it is for myself and everyone I know. We were taught one way but ignored it after class was over because that’s just not how people speak around here. I don’t know why teachers were so adamant about the “and” meaning “decimal point” exclusively.
I suspect there are jobs where being clear in how you communicate numbers is important and this style of speaking eliminates ambiguity. Kind of like the phonetic alphabet does when communicating over radio. But it sure isn’t common in colloquial speech in my dialect or most American dialects I’m aware of.
That’s a good way of thinking about it. Teachers tell you all sorts of things about how to talk. They tell you to say “May” instead of “Can” when asking to go to the bathroom. They tell you not to split infinitives. They tell you not to end sentences with prepositions. I had one teacher who insisted that the word “kid” applied only to juvenile goats, and that juvenile human beings were “children,” with no exceptions. Woe betide you if you ever talked about “being a kid” in her presence.
You do it to please the teacher, I suppose. Then once you leave their class, you promptly forget about it because if you talk like that in real life, you sound like a dork.
That said, I honestly do not remember any teacher ever telling me that “and” indicated a decimal point. The first place (indeed, the only place) I heard of that was this very message board. It doesn’t correspond to anything I’ve ever encountered in my everyday life.