Numbers Girl.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a numbers girl, which is one of the 8,742 reasons I became an economist in the first place.

I see things that other people don’t notice. On my daily commute, I walk up or down a total of 279 steps each morning and evening. In exponential notation, my phone number is 6.2e⁸. My social security number only includes prime numbers; I could tell you the odds of that, but then you’d really think I’m insane.

Moving to France, I knew I had to learn a new language, but didn’t realize that numbers were part of the problem, too. I assumed that a 1 in English would be a 1 in French, only to find that when hand-written, a French 1 looks almost like an upside-down V. And a 9 looks like a lower-case G. So since arriving in France, I’ve had to rediscover a lot of what I thought I knew about numbers.

In English, when we want to exaggerate the amount of something, we’ll usually talk about millions, as in “I went to Wal-Mart and there were, like, a million people there.” In French, all such exaggerated numbers come out as either ten thousand or thirty-six thousand, as in “my a**hole boss gave me 10,000 things to do” or “the vet says my poodle has 36,000 fleas.”

Even just counting is a matter of calculation in French. For any number in the seventies, you have to add a number in the teens to the number sixty (for example, soixante dix-sept); for any number in the eighties, you have to multiply four times twenty and then add (for example, quatre vingts huit); and for anything in the nineties, you have to do both (for example, quatre vingts dix neuf).

In English, we reserve such numbering for nursery rhymes (“Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie…”) and political speeches when we don’t want people to know what we’re talking about (“Four score and seven years ago…”). But in French, complex numbers are a part of normal life. I had a nightmare once where I met the man of my dreams, but his phone number ended with something like 72 86 97. To my horror, I wrote it all down wrong and never found him again.

The French also have historical terms that incorporate numbers in ways that we would never do. When I was first here, I didn’t understand why people were always talking about the “War of 1418,” which I was embarrassed not to have ever heard of. I looked it up and found that in 1418, the Hundred Years’ War was well underway, but there didn’t seem to be any war by that name. The only noteworthy thing I found that happened in 1418 was the capture of Paris by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy—hardly the sort of event you would expect people to still be talking about almost 600 years later.

So I asked my friends what all of this “War of 1418” talk was all about and they of course helpfully told me that I was the idiot: by “1418”, they meant that it started in 14 and ended in 18; that is, it lasted from 1914 until 1918. They were talking about World War I. That explanation also helped to clear things up for me about that other war they kept talking about—the “War of 3945” now made sense.

Incidentally, did you ever wonder why they say “Seconde Guerre Mondiale” for “Second World War” instead of saying “Deuxième Guerre Mondiale”? It’s because “seconde and “deuxième” aren’t exactly the same thing. They both mean “second”, but “seconde” is used when listing things that only go up to number two, whereas “deuxième” is used in a list that goes to three or beyond. In other words, they say “Seconde Guerre Mondiale” just because there hasn’t been a Third World War yet.

If your French friends ever starting saying “Deuxième Guerre Mondiale”, that’s a hint that they know something we don’t.