News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 8 (entry 0)

(2) Sun Mar 08 2009 13:48:

"I hate it with the passion of 1,004 suns."
"Why four?"
"Because I like to have more passion."
"Why not, say, 2,000 suns?"
"That's too many suns."

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Comments:

Posted by kirkjerk at Tue Mar 10 2009 11:51

Is that pronounced "one thousand and four" or "one thousand four" or what?

Lately I've been thinking about how people are probably worse at visualizing, say, 50 pennies than they think. I wonder if languages that say stuff like "three twenties" for sixty have a better grip on it.

Posted by anonymous at Tue Mar 10 2009 12:25

I said "a thousand and four", because that pushes the punchline closer to the end of the sentence. Hearing "a thousand..." sounds like a cliche about to be activated, and hearing "one thousand" doesn't.