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Jon Hodgson wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 21, 2017 4:22 pm

My goodness, you went through every example to somehow "disprove" it? Again, I ask - are you ok, in yourself, Stormcrow? You seem like such an angry, unfriendly guy all the time.

Ummm... what? You posted a whole bunch of "hundred" examples and wondered if there was any deeper meaning to the usage. So I looked at each one and gave my opinions of them. I wasn't trying to prove or disprove anything. I found your observation interesting and delved into it.

And hey, you missed my point completely: namely that Tolkien uses the words "a hundred" constantly. So that's an interesting thing we can emulate if we want to sound like Tolkien ourselves.

You made that point clearly. I don't disagree with it and didn't have anything to add to it.

Clearly we need an XKCD infographic showing occurrences of dozen, score, hundred, and thousand across all the books.

Don't forget gross.

Is that a regular gross, a great gross or a small gross?

You speak of tons?

Terisonen wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 21, 2017 8:43 pm

You speak of tons?

Metric #%?$-tons.

A deuce of sturdy hobbits

A great gross is 1728 I believe and a small gross is 120 btw.

Stormcrow wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 21, 2017 10:52 pm

A deuce of sturdy hobbits

That does remind me that I believe Sam refers to “a brace of coneys”.

Going on a slight tangent, in Chinese "one thousand" is used to mean infinity, or at least a very very large number. That's why Mao propaganda when he was alive said he would live 1000 years.

It was also the source of some of the confusion in Marco Polo's accounts of China. He said for example that there were a thousand bridges in Hangzhou. Anyone going there today would be hard pressed to find so many or even understand how so many bridges could exist, let alone in the 13th century. It is now believed that Polo's self-tought grasp of Chinese made him miss some of the language subtlety and take the 1000 number literally.