I see this a lot on legal documents, and I’ve never heard of a reason for it until spoke-'s post above, which seems to make a lot of sense. On the other hand, for something I am doing on right now, I have to work with copies of some real estate grants from the mid-1800’s where the property descriptions are all hand-written (in a very nice script, by the way), but the numbers are all spelled out in text, without parentheticals.
Anyway, I was taught to eliminate the parentheticals and just go with the words or the numbers to avoid confusion. The one exception (and I don’t know the reason for this) is when I am preparing a promissory note or similar instrument, I will both spell out and write in numbers the face instrument.
The use of words/numbers is also an important redundancy. If you used just numbers for a sum, it’s easy to alter. $133 can become $488 with just a few pen strokes. However, “one hundred thirty-three” is difficult to change to “four hundred eighty-eight” without someone getting suspicious. That’s one reason, I suspect, why the words have primacy over the numbers.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
It has use in systems because of all the fancy fonts. I spend a large part of the time assigning passcodes etc. If I give someone Marl1. This looks clear. But supposing I email it to him and his computer receives that email in Time Roman Font. It can look like Marll. The one looks like the l.
So I put the words AND numbers in as there are so many funky fonts it is hard to read. I found Arial is the most stable. There is even a place that will make your own personal font out of your handwriting.
I’ve always understood the redundancy to be a quality check (error catcher). My understanding, from my partner’s inquiries to the bank, is that the textual amount of a check is the binding amount, but if there’s a question (difference) they’ll usually ask you to get another check.
In contractual writings, these redundancies serve as both quality checks and hinge points for disputes (it makes a difference if I said I’d pay you $50K or $5K for the job).
We do style contracts with textual and ($numerical) statements. Hardly the worst of legalese.
I though’ I was having
a luvlee spo’ o’ tee—
—actual-lee.
Bu’ now tha’ you mention it, mate,
A li’ll bit o’trouble
is been troubling me.
I wondah can you help,
maybe answer this, please:
HOW DO YOU SPELL, “PASTAH”
or “PAHSTA”
and how do you spell “CHEEZ,”
or “CHEEEZ,”
or,
dammmit,
iz it “CHEEZE!?”
Why?
Oh—because I smell it
in the “FLEA FACTORY.”
Hardeehardee har har
and please pahz da cheeze.
Yes, as labradorian retrieved from the commercial codes, “…if words are ambiguous, figures control.” This is what I meant to recall, in my own words, despite any ambiguity. Wow, thanx doctor retriever.
Or, in other words, the spelled out words win.
Umm, doesn’t the commercial code most easily suggest, in a critical sense, that the figures win. …putting the context in regard to cases of ambiguity. I mean, it is a given that the flow of text has its general force. You know?
I live in Buffalo NY. I grew up in an area of Buffalo, NY called Lovejoy, AKA Iron Island. It is named Iron Island because of the railroad tracks surrounding the neighborhood. This area of Buffalo is predominantly poor white trash. Its almost the Xenia OH of Buffalo. A lot of these people are uneducated and illiterate. Even though I have a developmental disability of my own (Aspergers Syndrome), I have pretty advanced reading and writing skills. I am a musician, a computer technician and I work and have my own apartment in the community.
So what does this all have to do with parenthetical numerals you ask?
Well growing up I would go a pizzeria in my neighborhood named Carbones Pizza. I noticed something funny about the menu. They had two sizes of breadsticks, five breadsticks and ten breadsticks. But thats not all, the way it was written caught my eye. It didn’t just say Five Breadsticks and Ten Breadsticks. It said Five (5) Breadsticks and Ten (10) Breadsticks. So I asked the dude working there why it said that and this was his answer.
“Its written like that for the people who can’t read good. Its like how everything in the US in written in English and Spanish or Canada in English and French. We wrote that so that the people who can’t read good can understand. It’s simplified for the simple folks”
So thats why parenthetical numerals exist. For people who can’t read good.
Would it surprise you to know that there might be more than one valid reason to do something? Lawyers who draw up contracts, bankers who create negotiable instruments, and pizza dudes who make up menus may all be doing the same thing for their own reasons. Yet, these reasons can all be equally valid.
Damn! I started reading this thread, not realizing it was a zombie, and thought “I have an opinion on this.” Then, I came upon the post I wrote about it nearly fifteen years ago!
FWIW - I am (with 20 years programming in and around banks) of the impression that, if the numeric number on the check is not the same as the verbal (look it up! and REMEMBER IT!) one, the verbal one controls.
I was once given such a check - the maker had written the transaction amount correctly in the numeric box, but had written out the account balance in the text.
I was nice…
And I find it amusing that the “experts” now value brevity. Used to be Oratory was highly valued. Speeches would drone on for hours. The legend of the Gettysburg Address comes to mind.
Years ago, when I worked in banking, I was told that on our checks where the amounts didn’t match, the bank would honor the check for the smaller amount.
The theory being that our customer can always issue another check for the difference, if it was supposed to be for the larger amount. But it might be a lot harder for our customer to get an overpayment refunded. Also, it makes it harder to do scams where the check amount is altered. As recently as a couple years ago, that was still the case.
But it may be changing: most banks no longer have hordes of employees to key in the amount in machine-readable text along the bottom of the check. Instead, that is done by a computer, and it looks only at the digits of the amount. So in practice, it is changing to the numeric digits being the relevant ones. But that’s probably just the way the automation works. The code still specifies that the textual amount overrides, so the bank would have to make good if their machines took the larger numeric amount (assuming that the customer noticed, and bothered to complain).
Also I should note that since then when I talk about ordering breadsticks from there, I say “I got an order of ten (10) breadsticks” That’s the product name. You don’t call a Big Mac a double cheese burger with special sauce do you? No you say Big Mac. So I consider the term “Ten (10) Breadsticks” to be the product.
I have since went and made my entire language around this phenomena. Yeah it’s more work but it help the people who can’t read good. I feel I am giving back to the community.
It may be worthwhile to revive this old thread, as the practices are changing and it’s time to revisit this.
Today, most checks are optically scanned and never seen or handled by a live human at the bank. The scanning algorithm looks at the number written in digits on the check, not at the written-out name of the number. The terms-and-conditions document that comes with my checking account (I have seen several from different banks) state the explicitly.
For the same reason, banks explicitly disavow any responsibility for processing post-dated or stale-dated checks. The optical scanning process simply doesn’t look at the date on the check.
ETA: Okay, partially ninjaed by t-bonham@scc.net
The important thing that my post adds to this is that the T&C document explicitly says so, and disavows any responsibility if that happens to be the wrong thing.
The above posts confirm why, in the rest of the world, cheques are almost extinct as a means of transferring cash. Too easy to forge or alter, too easy to lose and too labour intensive (even machine scanned) to be practical.
The last time I wrote a cheque was in 2013 to pay an electrician.
In 2012, we had a customer write a check for $81 which was written out “sithy-one” dollars or maybe it said “eithy-one”. It’s hard to say whether the first letter was an “e” or an “s”, but there was definitely no “g” anywhere in the written words and the “h” was definitely after the “t”.
I said that it was obviously supposed to say eighty-one and the person writing the check misspelled “eighty” but the bank said it was a misspelling of “sixty” and accused me of altering the Arabic “6” into an “8”. They cashed it for 61.00. I called the customer to recover the difference and he refused to pay it.
The punchline is that the correct amount was supposed to be $83.
In 1979, my sister almost went to jail for a discrepancy of sixty cents. She filled up her car with gas and the total came to $2.79 and she wrote a check. In the numbers section she wrote “2.79” but it looked like “2.19” and in the words section she wrote “two and 79/100” but it looked like “two and 19/100” so the bank cashed it for $2.19. Then the gas station called us on the phone and said Mrs. such-and-such wrote a bad check, but we thought they were talking about my mother and she denied having written any checks at that gas station. A week later, a police officer showed up on our front porch with a warrant for my sister’s arrest, but she wasn’t home. The next day, she went to the gas station and paid them 60 cents.
For decades after that, I insisted on writing out not only the dollar amounts but the cents amount too. If my sister had written “two and seventy-nine hundredths” everything would have been fine.