CGP GREY: I'm from downstate New York.

LYNNE MURPHY: I live now in Brighton, England.

CGP GREY: And I live in London now.

BRADY HARAN: So how long have you been in the UK?

LYNNE MURPHY: 13 years.

CGP GREY: So I've been living here for 10 years.

And I've spent a lot of that time working as a physics

teacher in secondary schools.

LYNNE MURPHY: So if you're giving somebody your phone

number or your credit card number, and you've got two

numbers in a row that are the same.

So my number is 8844 in my office.

The British way to say that would be double 8, double 4.

And it would have never occurred to me

to say it that way.

CGP GREY: I don't know about Americans in general.

But I can say that for me, when I moved to London, I was

really thrown by the double numbers

thing for quite a while.

LYNNE MURPHY: I would say 8, 8, 4, 4.

I might say 88, 44.

But I wouldn't say double 8, double 4.

CGP GREY: When I moved here, there were two problems.

One is the double numbers thing.

And the second thing is that people say the telephone

numbers in a different pattern than they do US numbers.

So it was that different pattern, plus people saying

things like double 5, double 9.

I had such a hard time getting those numbers the first time.

And maybe I'm just particularly slow.

LYNNE MURPHY: The thing that always trips me up is I don't

know whether to say triple when I get three of those

things in a row.

So if I had a credit card that had three 0's in a row, do I

say triple 0?

Do I say double 0, 0?

Do I say 0, double 0?

Do I say 0, 0, 0?

I don't know what to say.

I'd love to hear from British people, some instruction on

how to read my credit card number.

CGP GREY: Off the top of my head, I can't think of having

ever heard triple, but I wouldn't rule it out.

I don't actually know.

Perhaps your commenters can let us

know if they say triple.

LYNNE MURPHY: Another example is what happens when you use

numbers in the thousands, or numbers with four digits.

The president's address--

that's called 1600

Pennsylvania Avenue in American.

And I think most British people would be comfortable

with that being sixteen hundred.

But when you get to a bigger number, Americans are happy to

say that is fifty-three hundred.

A British person would probably call this five

thousand three hundred here.

CGP GREY: Where I grew up on downstate New York, pretty

much everybody around me would say fifty-three hundred.

Like for example, I know that my parents will say

fifty-three hundred.

But for me as a kid, I always found that a confusing way to

phrase that.

There's something about it that just

doesn't jell in my mind.

And honestly, it took me years and years to really get that.

And so in my mind, when I hear someone say something like

seventy-two hundred, I have to kind of think about it in

terms of $100 bills.

So again, if someone says fifty-three hundred, I have to

visualize 53 $100 bills on a table.

For me, I always consciously made an effort to say five

thousand three hundred instead of fifty-three hundred.

BRADY HARAN: Which do you think is more elegant?

Fifty-three hundred or five thousand three hundred?

LYNNE MURPHY: Well, five thousand three hundred is

easier to understand.

I mean, when I say fifty-three hundred, I get confused myself

whether I mean 5,300 or 53,000.

CGP GREY: Even though I think that fifty-three hundred is

linguistically nicer--

it sort of rolls off the tongue more easily--

but I like the precision in saying five

thousand three hundred.

But I was definitely going against the tide of people

that I lived around.

LYNNE MURPHY: Nevertheless, I find it easy to say.

When I'm thinking of numbers, when I want to say how much

something costs.

CGP GREY: You deal with $100 bills in America.

Like, it's not rare to come across $100 bills.

Whereas I don't think there are--

now, I'm not 100% sure.

But I don't think that there are 100-pound notes that are

actually produced.

I think it stops at 50.

And I have only incredibly rarely in my life, ever seen

someone actually use a 50-pound note.

And it's always remarkable.

Like at a bank, I'll see someone pull out a 50.

So maybe that's why as an American, it's easier to think

in terms of amounts of $100 bills, right?

I have 12 $100 bills.

So that's twelve hundred.

I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

But that might be why British people are not as comfortable

with that kind of phrasing.

LYNNE MURPHY: The second year of the 2000s was two thousand

one, in American speech, generally.

But in British speech, that sounds weird.

That sounds American.

You'd say two thousand and one.

So two thousand one, two thousand and one.

CGP GREY: This is one of those cases where, having lived in

London for 10 years, and in particular, having taught in

front of classes and being very used to speaking to

British people all the time, I can sometimes kind of forget

these little phrases, and which way have

I always said it.

And just naturally thinking about it, the two thousand and

one or two thousand one--

which way would I have said it when I was in New York?

I'm not 100% sure.

I think I would've said two thousand one, but it's one of

those things that gets kind of lost when you move from one

country to another.

Sometimes those little things can just kind of--

you just become uncertain about how it was.

And then you feel like a crazy person, right?

You feel like, I should know how I used to say things, but

you just lose it.

But I did look up, after you mentioned that the two

thousand and one--

I wanted to see how Arthur C. Clarke

actually says that number.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Of course, "Two Thousand and One"--

CGP GREY: He's British, and he says in interviews-- he says

"Two Thousand and One" as the title for his book is the way

he always phrased it.

I tried to find some audio of Stanley Kubrick saying the

title of the movie.

But he's an incredibly secretive kind of guy and

didn't do very many interviews about it.

And so I was unable to find any clip of Stanley Kubrick

actually speaking aloud the name of perhaps his most

famous movie.

LYNNE MURPHY: If you want to count out seconds, which

people sometimes need to do, a typical way of doing this is

to have a word that you put in between your numbers to make

it long enough that you've got a full second

between the two numbers.

And the typical way to do this in American English, or a

typical way to do it is to use the word Mississippi.

So 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi.

CGP GREY: 4 Mississippi, 5 Mississippi, 6 Mississippi.

LYNNE MURPHY: Hopefully, it's about a second.

I've never actually tested it.

CGP GREY: I have no idea where it comes from, except that

it's a fun word to say.

And it's long, so that seems like an obvious choice to go

in the middle.

LYNNE MURPHY: Another way to do it is 1, one thousand, 2,

one thousand, which you'll notice has a different number

of syllables.

The 1, one thousand, 2, one thousand I think is found in

both America and Britain.

But then in Britain, you've got other ones, like 1

Piccadilly, 2 Piccadilly, 3 Piccadilly, or 1 elephant, 2

elephant, 3 elephant.

CGP GREY: I was trying to think about this, and I don't

think I've ever had the opportunity to hear any of my

students count in this kind of way that you would do, where

you're intentionally doing seconds.

So I don't know what any of them would have said.

But you asking me about this is basically the first time

I've ever heard about Piccadilly or elephant.

LYNNE MURPHY: When I said 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi,

that's how I learned it, with that very specific, sing-song

kind of rhythm to help you count out the seconds.

And because I've only done this on the blog, I've not

actually heard people say 1 Piccadilly, 2 Piccadilly.

I'm not quite sure how they're singing it.

CGP GREY: Piccadilly I think is OK.

It has that same kind of rhythm as Mississippi, right?

So 1 Mississippi, 2 Piccadilly, 3 elephant.

Elephant does not work.

I don't think that works at all.

1 elephant, 2 elephant--

it's so clunky.

It's no good at all.

I have to veto that one, but Piccadilly, Piccadilly seems

incredibly similar to Mississippi.

So I'm perfectly happy with that as a difference.

LYNNE MURPHY: But it's also the kind of thing that I've

found people have family versions of that aren't used

anywhere outside their extended families.

There's room for lots of variation.

BRADY HARAN: We want to hear what word you put in between

numbers when you count, to make sure

there's a second spacing.

So put comments under the video.

Mississippi, elephant, Piccadilly, thousand,

something different?

We want to know.

LYNNE MURPHY: People often ask me, or express astonishment

when they get American addresses that they need to

send something to.

And the address might be four or five digits long, the

number before the street.

So to live at 2787 Main Street, or

something like that.

Whereas the last place I lived here was number 7, and my

mother always found that strange.

She often wrote it as 70.

She just couldn't imagine that I really lived at a place that

was only number 7 in the great scheme of things.

CGP GREY: It's funny, because I never really tuned into the

low house numbers thing.

I mean, now that you have mentioned it, it seems

incredibly obvious.

And yes, I can think of a bunch of addresses in my life

here that were low numbers.

And it's definitely the case-- well, at least it's the case

in New York growing up that I don't think there was ever a

house number that was less than 100.

So I knew people who lived in 100, or 107, or 109 houses,

but I don't think there was ever a single address that was

below that number.

LYNNE MURPHY: Where I'm from, you never have a single digit.

You rarely have a two-digit street address.

So my family is on the first block of Miller Street, and

the first number is 100.

Well, it's about the grid road system in America.

In England, you don't talk about blocks the same way you

do in America, because the roads are all

higgledy-piggledy and don't necessarily make nice squares.

But since American ones typically do make nice

squares, what you want in the system is to have the numbers

all match within each block.

You talk about the 100 block of Miller Street.

Once you cross the road that intersects with Miller Street

and go on to the next block, it'll be the 200 block.

So my block of my street where I grew up goes up to 131.

And then it starts over at 200 once you cross the road.

BRADY HARAN: So your numbers get higher quicker.

LYNNE MURPHY: Yeah.