TWELFTY, n., adj. This newsletter has covered the weirdness of counting in French before, but did you know that counting in English also used to be weird as hell? My husband brought this to my attention recently. He discovered this word—twelfty—after buying some nails and wondering why the sizes are so strange.
In case you do not frequent your local hardware store multiple times a week, as my husband does and I do not, nails come in sizes that are sometimes called “six-penny,” “eight-penny,” “twelve-penny,” and so on. These sizes are sometimes referred to as 6d, 8d, 12d.
Romance language connection: that d stands for denarius, a silver coin from Ancient Rome.
A 6d or six-penny nail is 2 inches long, by the way. A 12d nail is 3.25 inches long. This seems like a nonsense way to organize things, but that’s how you get the most interesting etymologies, and I am not a carpenter trying to buy nails in medieval England, so what do I have to complain about?
Supposedly, these names refer to the price of buying a hundred nails. You could get a hundred six-penny nails for six pennies at some point in history. But the hundred in “a hundred nails” is another twist, because back in the day, English had “a hundred” as in 100 and also “a long hundred,” or 120, AKA “twelfty.”
If you were a shrewd medieval English carpenter, your six pennies would have bought you twelfty 2-inch nails. A long hundred.
If you’re a Tolkien fan, “twelfty” might seem familiar to you, because Tolkien worked this system into his books. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo celebrates his “eleventy-first” birthday. He’s 111. (I think “twelfty” might appear in the books too, but am not able to confirm it.)
What the hell is going on here? This weirdness stems from a cultural collision: the Romans, like contemporary English speakers, used a base-10 (or “decimal”) number system. Old English, like many Germanic languages, has traces of a base-12 (“duodecimal” or “dozenal,” like “dozen”) number system. English also has the word “score” as in 20, which would be important if you were using a base-20 (“vigesimal”) system. (Many Celtic languages retain traces of a base-20 system, as does French.)
I’m mentioning the base-20 system because, In My Humble Opinion, it helps to explain the existence of the long hundred. If you’re using a pure base-12 system, 120 is nothing special. It’s still two dozen short of a gross (144, twelve dozen). But if you live in the cultural chaos of people around you counting variously by 10, 12, or 20, then 120 might seem significant. A long hundred is six score or ten dozen.
Shit, that’s complicated. Anyway, the point is, English has some weird words that result from the co-existence of all these different ways of counting.
The obvious question remaining is that if English counts by going seventy, eighty, ninety, and we used to have eleventy and twelfty, then did we ever say “tenty”? I can’t find much confirmation, outside the existence of Anglo-Saxon “teon-tig.” (“Tig” became the suffix “-ty.”) But Wikipedia says people used to specify that they were using the decimal system by noting that they were counting “tenty-wise,” i.e. by tens.
So: kind of!
You know what other weird number words I encountered this week? I was reading John McWhorter’s article “Don’t Use the Word Emolument” and he mentioned that “hickory, dickory, dock,” as in the nursery rhyme, is actually “eight, nine, ten” in a Celtic language as (mis)heard by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Confirmed: Cumbric, an extinct Celtic language once spoken in Northern England and parts of Scotland, counts hovera, dovera, dick.
(I don’t have any jokes to make about that.)
I love that every time you scratch the surface of English, you find hundreds (long hundreds) or thousands of years of history and culture, and all these other languages that were our ancestors or our cousins or our misunderstood neighbors.
This week was busy—I finished writing a book! I started recording another audiobook! I socialized a lot!—and that was great, but I didn’t get to read as much as I wanted to. But in small-r romance, I read…
American Dreamer (m/m, both cis and gay, contemporary) by Adriana Herrera. This book is so lovely. Nesto and Jude have such cute flirting, and I love how Herrera writes this big community of friends and family who watch out for each other. Nesto’s mom and all his friends help to make his Caribbean food truck successful in Upstate New York, and there are such beautiful descriptions of his cooking—it made me both hungry and emotional. This book deals deftly with contemporary social issues while still remaining hopeful, romantic, and sexy. A pleasure to read. Content warnings: a main character is estranged from his homophobic family, a supporting character is dying of cancer, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, sex.
As I said above, I didn’t read anything in French this week, but mentioning the experience of immigrants made me think of this passage in Fatou Diome’s beautiful 2001 novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (The Belly of the Atlantic), about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France:
Is this my home or someone else’s? I am a hybrid being; perplexed, Africa and Europe wonder which end of me belongs to them. I am the child brought before King Solomon’s sword to be shared equally. In permanent exile, I spend my nights welding the rails that lead to identity. Writing is the hot wax that I pour into the furrows hollowed out by those who built the partitions on either side. I am the scar tissue that grows where men have drawn their borders, cutting into God’s earth. (Translation is my own.)
And in the original French, for those who are into that:
Chez moi ? Chez l’Autre ? Être hybride, l’Afrique et l’Europe se demandent, perplexes, quel bout de moi leur appartient. Je suis l’enfant présenté au sabre du roi Salomon pour le juste partage. Exilée en permanence, je passe mes nuits à souder les rails qui mènent à l’identité. L’écriture est la cire chaude que je coule entre les sillons creusés par les bâtisseurs de cloisons des deux bords. Je suis cette chéloïde qui pousse là où les hommes, en traçant leur frontières, ont blessé la terre de Dieu.
