I had a teacher in high school who, whenever someone asked a stupid question, would say “a buck three-eighty-two.” I once asked him what it meant, and he just looked at me in a weird way, as if I should have known what he was talking about, and changed the subject. Another time I asked him about it, he told me to look it up.
I am puzzled and baffled by this phrase. “A buck three-eighty-two.” At least that’s what I think he was saying.
To give some background: the guy was a former steelworker, and had also worked as a delivery courier for a handgun shop. The class he taught was law education. He was a crime buff and obsessed with criminology and legal studies.
What did this cryptic phrase mean? Was it something from the lingo of one of these subcultures that he was involved in?
Heh, we say “A dollar two eighty-nine” although I haven’t a clue how that got started. It’s a nonsense amount, completely meaningless.
Say you’re on your way to someone’s house and give the “anything we need picked up?” call, you stop for beer and they ask how much they owe you but you don’t want the payback so it’s $1-2.89 instead of the real amount.
I asked a similar question a while back, about Billy Joel’s phrase “a buck three eighty won’t buy you much lately on the street these days” in the song “Borderline” (off Glass Houses), but it was apparently long enough ago that the thread is no longer available on the boards. The discussion was interesting but inconclusive.
The way to say 183 in German (translated, of course) is “one hundred three and eighty.” Whether this is true for other languages, I don’t know, but’s it’s not hard to imagine an immigrant who has learned the English words but still uses the idomatic word order of his native tongue. From there it’s a small step to saying “a dollar three eighty” or “a buck three eighty” when referring to $1.83.
Naturally, this would sound odd to a native English speaker, maybe even nonsensical. Human nature being what it is, people would make fun of it, even exaggerating the nonsensical aspect by expanding it to “a buck three eighty-two.”
So it started out as a blend of English words with German (or other language) word order, and morphed into a way of expressing silliness.
Well you can give a reasonable answer to that one of 113, and I doubt it can be considered any other value if it is to have a determined value.
Tenty = 100
Twelvetyfour = 124
Twentyfourtyfour = 244
Whilst a buck three-eight-two can be extrapolated in several ways with no espescially reasonable value to assign it $383 or $14 $4.82 or $1.13 or $1.38 . 2 (petrol price maybe)
Most of these nonsense expressions seem to begin with a buck, because when we are using the term buck seriously, it’s only for even dollar amounts–except for prices between $1.00 and $2.00.
So we’ll say a buck thirty-five ($1.35), but not *two bucks thirty-five ($2.35), or *six bucks thirty-five ($6.35). We’ll say two hundred bucks ($200), but not *two hundred bucks seventy-five ($200.75).
Bilbo Baggins celebrated his “eleventy-first” birthday when he turned 111. The word “eleventy”, while quaint and often used tongue-in-cheek is not nonsense.