Back to my school days at Mass. Pharmacy , I remember my Economics professor stating that the soap mentioned was, 99 44/100 % pure “Ivory Soap”. Which no other soap could claim.
Bizarrely, search turns up two separate columns with the same date, August 20, 1993, and same questioner name, but with different titles and somewhat different answers.
There’s Ivory soap is 99 and 44/100% pure what?
and also If Ivory Soap is 99 and 44/100% pure, what’s the other 56/100%?
Can someone explain that?
The standard answer is that the columns were first published in the newspaper, subsequently published in books, then posted on the AOL site, and finally archived here on this site. At any step in that process, they could be subjected to reediting.
At a guess, someone dug up the AOL version and someone else entered the book version, and thus we have two slightly different columns.
But under that interpretation, wouldn’t Ivory Soap be 100% Ivory Soap?
When I was a kid I remember the slogan as 99 and 44, 100 percent pure. Just sayin’