Sunday, September 30, 2007

Is there a collective noun for "numbers"?

I'm pondering if there is a collective noun for numbers, other than the word numbers, course. That would be silly. Digits show up in all different kinds of places and are used in different ways. Is there a term to describe them when they show up on one blog entry?

0: number of times I'd eaten eggs benedict in the last 40 years

1: number of weeks in the fall quarter completed to date
also: number of times a student has asked me this quarter: Exactly what are you drinking?

2: difference between number of students who showed up on day one and the number of chairs in the room that faced the front

3: number of times I've eaten eggs benedict for breakfast in the last two weeks

4: number of minutes it takes me to cross campus from my brand spankin' new office to the room my 8 o'clock class is held in; does not include coffee pick-up

48: number of hours it took to render a digital copy of 5+ hours of Pride & Prejudice, starring His Dimpleness Colin Firth, and move it to my iPhone. Time well spent. Mr. Wickham looks smarmy no matter the screen dimensions.

4663: the simple, elegant and completely wrong answer



And just because it's cool: Zipskinny. Enter your zip code and get some cool census data, like the education level attainment, demographics, income levels and how it compares to neighboring zip codes. Not a bad use for numbers. Whereas "dictionary diving" is a term that refers to the act of getting lost in a dictionary even though you only went in with the intention of finding one word, "digit diving" refers to getting lost in a page a numbers like those on Zipskinny. I'm going to go type in the zips of all the places I've ever lived. Ta for now.

2 comments:

kfluff said...

I think the word you're looking for is "index." Sort of like "Harper's Index"?

Andrea said...

Yes! We with small vocabularies thank you.