In the “And” it doesn’t even matter

When you are learning language, pay attention to grammar. Those were the words of my English teacher. No guesses for what I did. I ignored and here I stand before you with my poor grammar skills. I knew this when I started this blog and I thought I’ll improve. I have improved to some extent. That’s enough. Now about the “And”.  Sorry for ruining the lyrics of that rocking track by Linkin Park. That tops my favorites list.

What to do? I couldn’t think of any better title. This “And” became my topic when I was having conversation on twitter. One tweet appeared on my twitter homepage.

“If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you need to count to find the first letter A?”

I knew the answer and I replied “thousand”. And one twitter replied with “one hundred and one”. Now comes the confusion. Which one is correct? I knew it was “thousand” but the one who asked the question got confused. Moral is “Having bad grammar helps you to stay away from confusion”.

Improper grammar leads to funny incidents also. It can be embarrassing if you don’t take things lightly. (I am very serious kind of person. Don’t make fun of me.) Take this candidate’s application :

“This has reference to your advertisement calling for a ‘typist and an accountant – Male or Female’. As I am both for the past several years and I can handle both, I am applying for the post.”

When I was in college, there was a legendary workshop supervisor. His English was very bad. In the first workshop class he said “Machine the on”. It took all the courage and effort in the world to stop myself from laughing. I’ll never forget this incidence.

This post is just for fun and not at all to show my hate or love towards English. It will be always the language which is my mother tongue. I just took this as a challenge to write a post from a simple ignorable tweet. Oh!! And to clarify all the doubts about the riddle. In the end the “And” doesn’t matter.

I cannot say “Till my next grammatical mistake”. It will be in the next post itself. So I’ll say,

Till English is a funny language…

Think Nonsense…

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3 Comments

  1. You were right…almost.

    The correct answer would be “one thousand”. The other responder was mistaken. The number is actually spelled, “One hundred one”.

    Glad that you are learning more and more through immersion. Language is so complex…even native speakers struggle.

    If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have a blog!

    Have a very Merry Christmas 🙂

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