LYNNE MURPHY: I am from upstate New York.
CGP GREY: I'm from downstate New York.
LYNNE MURPHY: I live now in Brighton, England.
CGP GREY: And I live in London now.
BRADY HARAN: So how long have you been in the UK?
LYNNE MURPHY: 13 years.
CGP GREY: So I've been living here for 10 years.
And I've spent a lot of that time working as a physics
teacher in secondary schools.
LYNNE MURPHY: So if you're giving somebody your phone
number or your credit card number, and you've got two
numbers in a row that are the same.
So my number is 8844 in my office.
The British way to say that would be double 8, double 4.
And it would have never occurred to me
to say it that way.
CGP GREY: I don't know about Americans in general.
But I can say that for me, when I moved to London, I was
really thrown by the double numbers
thing for quite a while.
LYNNE MURPHY: I would say 8, 8, 4, 4.
I might say 88, 44.
But I wouldn't say double 8, double 4.
CGP GREY: When I moved here, there were two problems.
One is the double numbers thing.
And the second thing is that people say the telephone
numbers in a different pattern than they do US numbers.
So it was that different pattern, plus people saying
things like double 5, double 9.
I had such a hard time getting those numbers the first time.
And maybe I'm just particularly slow.
LYNNE MURPHY: The thing that always trips me up is I don't
know whether to say triple when I get three of those
things in a row.
So if I had a credit card that had three 0's in a row, do I
say triple 0?
Do I say double 0, 0?
Do I say 0, double 0?
Do I say 0, 0, 0?
I don't know what to say.
I'd love to hear from British people, some instruction on
how to read my credit card number.
CGP GREY: Off the top of my head, I can't think of having
ever heard triple, but I wouldn't rule it out.
I don't actually know.
Perhaps your commenters can let us
know if they say triple.
LYNNE MURPHY: Another example is what happens when you use
numbers in the thousands, or numbers with four digits.
The president's address--
that's called 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue in American.
And I think most British people would be comfortable
with that being sixteen hundred.
But when you get to a bigger number, Americans are happy to
say that is fifty-three hundred.
A British person would probably call this five
thousand three hundred here.
CGP GREY: Where I grew up on downstate New York, pretty
much everybody around me would say fifty-three hundred.
Like for example, I know that my parents will say
fifty-three hundred.
But for me as a kid, I always found that a confusing way to
phrase that.
There's something about it that just
doesn't jell in my mind.
And honestly, it took me years and years to really get that.
And so in my mind, when I hear someone say something like
seventy-two hundred, I have to kind of think about it in
terms of $100 bills.
So again, if someone says fifty-three hundred, I have to
visualize 53 $100 bills on a table.
For me, I always consciously made an effort to say five
thousand three hundred instead of fifty-three hundred.
BRADY HARAN: Which do you think is more elegant?
Fifty-three hundred or five thousand three hundred?
LYNNE MURPHY: Well, five thousand three hundred is
easier to understand.
I mean, when I say fifty-three hundred, I get confused myself
whether I mean 5,300 or 53,000.
CGP GREY: Even though I think that fifty-three hundred is
linguistically nicer--
it sort of rolls off the tongue more easily--
but I like the precision in saying five
thousand three hundred.
But I was definitely going against the tide of people
that I lived around.
LYNNE MURPHY: Nevertheless, I find it easy to say.
When I'm thinking of numbers, when I want to say how much
something costs.
CGP GREY: You deal with $100 bills in America.
Like, it's not rare to come across $100 bills.
Whereas I don't think there are--
now, I'm not 100% sure.
But I don't think that there are 100-pound notes that are
actually produced.
I think it stops at 50.
And I have only incredibly rarely in my life, ever seen
someone actually use a 50-pound note.
And it's always remarkable.
Like at a bank, I'll see someone pull out a 50.
So maybe that's why as an American, it's easier to think
in terms of amounts of $100 bills, right?
I have 12 $100 bills.
So that's twelve hundred.
I don't know if that has anything to do with it.
But that might be why British people are not as comfortable
with that kind of phrasing.
LYNNE MURPHY: The second year of the 2000s was two thousand
one, in American speech, generally.
But in British speech, that sounds weird.
That sounds American.
You'd say two thousand and one.
So two thousand one, two thousand and one.
CGP GREY: This is one of those cases where, having lived in
London for 10 years, and in particular, having taught in
front of classes and being very used to speaking to
British people all the time, I can sometimes kind of forget
these little phrases, and which way have
I always said it.
And just naturally thinking about it, the two thousand and
one or two thousand one--
which way would I have said it when I was in New York?
I'm not 100% sure.
I think I would've said two thousand one, but it's one of
those things that gets kind of lost when you move from one
country to another.
Sometimes those little things can just kind of--
you just become uncertain about how it was.
And then you feel like a crazy person, right?
You feel like, I should know how I used to say things, but
you just lose it.
But I did look up, after you mentioned that the two
thousand and one--
I wanted to see how Arthur C. Clarke
actually says that number.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Of course, "Two Thousand and One"--
CGP GREY: He's British, and he says in interviews-- he says
"Two Thousand and One" as the title for his book is the way
he always phrased it.
I tried to find some audio of Stanley Kubrick saying the
title of the movie.
But he's an incredibly secretive kind of guy and
didn't do very many interviews about it.
And so I was unable to find any clip of Stanley Kubrick
actually speaking aloud the name of perhaps his most
famous movie.
LYNNE MURPHY: If you want to count out seconds, which
people sometimes need to do, a typical way of doing this is
to have a word that you put in between your numbers to make
it long enough that you've got a full second
between the two numbers.
And the typical way to do this in American English, or a
typical way to do it is to use the word Mississippi.
So 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi.
CGP GREY: 4 Mississippi, 5 Mississippi, 6 Mississippi.
LYNNE MURPHY: Hopefully, it's about a second.
I've never actually tested it.
CGP GREY: I have no idea where it comes from, except that
it's a fun word to say.
And it's long, so that seems like an obvious choice to go
in the middle.
LYNNE MURPHY: Another way to do it is 1, one thousand, 2,
one thousand, which you'll notice has a different number
of syllables.
The 1, one thousand, 2, one thousand I think is found in
both America and Britain.
But then in Britain, you've got other ones, like 1
Piccadilly, 2 Piccadilly, 3 Piccadilly, or 1 elephant, 2
elephant, 3 elephant.
CGP GREY: I was trying to think about this, and I don't
think I've ever had the opportunity to hear any of my
students count in this kind of way that you would do, where
you're intentionally doing seconds.
So I don't know what any of them would have said.
But you asking me about this is basically the first time
I've ever heard about Piccadilly or elephant.
LYNNE MURPHY: When I said 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi,
that's how I learned it, with that very specific, sing-song
kind of rhythm to help you count out the seconds.
And because I've only done this on the blog, I've not
actually heard people say 1 Piccadilly, 2 Piccadilly.
I'm not quite sure how they're singing it.
CGP GREY: Piccadilly I think is OK.
It has that same kind of rhythm as Mississippi, right?
So 1 Mississippi, 2 Piccadilly, 3 elephant.
Elephant does not work.
I don't think that works at all.
1 elephant, 2 elephant--
it's so clunky.
It's no good at all.
I have to veto that one, but Piccadilly, Piccadilly seems
incredibly similar to Mississippi.
So I'm perfectly happy with that as a difference.
LYNNE MURPHY: But it's also the kind of thing that I've
found people have family versions of that aren't used
anywhere outside their extended families.
There's room for lots of variation.
BRADY HARAN: We want to hear what word you put in between
numbers when you count, to make sure
there's a second spacing.
So put comments under the video.
Mississippi, elephant, Piccadilly, thousand,
something different?
We want to know.
LYNNE MURPHY: People often ask me, or express astonishment
when they get American addresses that they need to
send something to.
And the address might be four or five digits long, the
number before the street.
So to live at 2787 Main Street, or
something like that.
Whereas the last place I lived here was number 7, and my
mother always found that strange.
She often wrote it as 70.
She just couldn't imagine that I really lived at a place that
was only number 7 in the great scheme of things.
CGP GREY: It's funny, because I never really tuned into the
low house numbers thing.
I mean, now that you have mentioned it, it seems
incredibly obvious.
And yes, I can think of a bunch of addresses in my life
here that were low numbers.
And it's definitely the case-- well, at least it's the case
in New York growing up that I don't think there was ever a
house number that was less than 100.
So I knew people who lived in 100, or 107, or 109 houses,
but I don't think there was ever a single address that was
below that number.
LYNNE MURPHY: Where I'm from, you never have a single digit.
You rarely have a two-digit street address.
So my family is on the first block of Miller Street, and
the first number is 100.
Well, it's about the grid road system in America.
In England, you don't talk about blocks the same way you
do in America, because the roads are all
higgledy-piggledy and don't necessarily make nice squares.
But since American ones typically do make nice
squares, what you want in the system is to have the numbers
all match within each block.
You talk about the 100 block of Miller Street.
Once you cross the road that intersects with Miller Street
and go on to the next block, it'll be the 200 block.
So my block of my street where I grew up goes up to 131.
And then it starts over at 200 once you cross the road.
BRADY HARAN: So your numbers get higher quicker.
LYNNE MURPHY: Yeah.
CGP GREY: It is almost unbelievable to me that the
numbers on one side of the street don't have anything to
do with the numbers on the other side of the street.
And I still come across this, and it's just appalling--
right?
That you're walking across the street, and the numbers on one
side are going 3, 5, 7, 9.
And you look across the other side of the street, and the
numbers will be 50, 48, 46, right?
They're even, they're not aligned, and they're going in
the opposite direction and it's just maddening.
I don't understand how this came to be, why anybody has
let it stand for as long as it has.
It is just baffling to me.
And the first few times that I ran across this, that I didn't
realize, like, you have to check the numbers on the other
side of the street, I got severely lost in London a
couple of times, trying to find places.
Because I'm walking down very long streets in the completely
opposite direction, thinking, oh, I'll just cross the street
when I need those even numbers, right?
And then you get to wherever you're supposed to be, you
cross the street.
And you're hundreds off from wherever you were actually
trying to get.
But you're still on the same street.
It's just unbelievable to me.
It's like, I refuse to believe that humans ever decided to do
this on purpose.
This isn't exactly number related, but I can tell you
the thing that I did notice, that I find is just charming,
is the habit of naming buildings "houses." So even
like, a giant office building will sometimes have a name.
And it'll be like, 70 Darwin House.
But this house suffix, or this house label for, like, big
corporate buildings, or just council flats, I find is kind
of remarkable and very charming in and of itself.
That strikes me as being very British, where someone could
say, oh, I live at 50 Feinman House.
But 50 Feinman House is a gigantic tower block, right?
It's not like a little cottage, like it sounds.
So I do quite like that.
I love to explore the city and just kind of wander around.
And there's always a ton of construction going on.
And in particular, in the past few years and right now,
there's a bunch of big, luxury buildings going up, or that
have been recently constructed.
And I can't help but notice that all of them want to be
number one at whatever they are.
So for example, there's 1 London Bridge, and there's 1
Blackfriar's, there's 1 Tower Bridge.
And these are luxury buildings.
And they always write it really big on the sign.
It'll say 1 Blackfriar's.
And the other thing that I can't help but notice is they
always like to write out the one.
It's O-N-E. It's never the number 1.
I find that interesting.
I assume that somewhere, some architecture firm decided that
this is a kind of luxury statement.
I'd be curious to know if this happens
elsewhere in the world.
Because as we discussed, I don't think that it can happen
in New York, because the buildings
can't start at 1, right?
They have to start at 100.
But I've noticed that some of these buildings that label
themselves as 1 whatever--
they're in suspicious spots.
Where I look around and I think, I'm not sure that you
can really claim that you are 1 Tower Bridge.
There are numerous buildings here, any of which looks like
they could be number 1 Tower Bridge.
So I have my doubts about the accuracy
of this number system.
Although with the street numbers, who knows, right?
The numbers don't have anything to do with anything,
so they could just be all over the place.
-So a man walks into a bar.
He asks for 10 times more drinks than everyone else.
The barman says, now that is an order of magnitude.