Humpty-Twelve and Telephone Number Quantities

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Not that long ago, we were talking about indefinite hyperbolic numerals.

You remember that conversation, Grant?

Right.

40, 11, zillions, jillions, and all those other approximate numbers.

Right.

Those indefinite approximate numbers.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I was visiting family in the mountains of North Carolina, and I heard another one that I really love and am going to adopt, which is Humpty 12.

Humpty 12.

About a dozen, but maybe not a dozen.

A little more, a little less.

A whole, yeah, yeah.

You know, I went on vacation, and I came back, and there were Humpty 12 pieces of junk mail.

Sounds like a cousin of umpteen.

Yes, I think it probably is, but it just, I don’t know.

It’s just something delicious to roll around on your tongue.

And you know what?

I was also looking around a little bit more, and you may be familiar with this one.

You can also use the term telephone number or telephone numbers.

Apparently since the 1940s, if you were talking telephone numbers, you were talking about a really big number.

So people would talk about that in terms of a large sum of money.

That house costs telephone numbers.

Or it could be applied to your time in prison.

He’s doing telephone numbers.

I can imagine a time in the history of the world where most people didn’t encounter a big number until they got a telephone number or saw one.

Yeah.

Well, I got to say, we have umpty 12 things to talk about on this show.

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