Talk:Indefinite and fictitious numbers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 3 June 2007. The result of the discussion was merge and redirect to Indefinite and fictitious large numbers.

I undid this merge, since there was no consensus (as the discussion shows). Just as many wanted to merge it the other way - that is, "Indefinite and ficitious large numbers" into THIS article. Please don't summarily make decisions when there's no consensus. - DavidWBrooks 22:11, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

  • Well whatever the pagename there shouldn't be 2 articles on the same topic... people wanted to merge the two articles. Move the other one here if the name is that important. --W.marsh 22:41, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree, but once the "merge" vote started we needed to wait for it to end. It produced no consensus at all, alas, just confusing the matter. - DavidWBrooks 02:09, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] three-peat

What about three-peat? I know there's a separate article, but does it deserve no mention at all in this article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.249.64.128 (talk) 15:27, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

IMHO - no. It's not a number, it's a concept. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 21:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
More specifically, it's the application of the very definite number 3 to a specific realm, and outside the scope of the article.
--Jerzy•t 11:37, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Forty

In a prior revision, someone added the potential metaphorical use of the number forty (40) as used in the Old Testament. OR or not, it's simply a metaphorical use of a real number (much like how someone might say "millions" just to mean a large number), and thus is not fictitious. Hence, I'm highly doubtful that it should be included in an article specifically titled "Indefinite fictitious numbers". Quick note: I'm not the editor who reverted the "forty" addition; I'm just a supporter of the reversion. Sistema Sepiroticum (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 18:10, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Umpty

The ref'd entry, tho in a reliable source -- Am Her Dict's 4th edn def -- is not very useful for our purposes:

  1. Since the context involves Morse code, "dash" is confusingly vague.
    Dash is of course the name of a punctuation mark, often confused with the hyphen, but it is also the name of one of the two (or rather, the two most prominent) code "atoms" of Morse, the dot and dash (also pronounced and spelled as dit and dah). (The other "atoms" i'm allowing for are: the pause between one dot or dash, and the next; the pause between one letter, number, or punctuation mark, and the next; and the pause between one word and the next.)
    My OR satisfies me that they are describing "ump" (but probably not "umpty") as the sound of dah: Morse code#Letters, numbers, punctuation does offer a Morse encoding of "double dash" (shown as "=" and linked to equals sign), and an underscore character, but no other mention of "dash" as something having an established Morse encoding.
    By elimination, that satisfies me that "dash" is used in the AHD def to mean the code atom, dash, aka dah, the complement of dot, aka dit (or di-). Perhaps what i've called OR is elementary enuf to be an exception to NOR.
  2. The description
    Slang ump(ty), dash in Morse code (of imitative origin) + -teen (as in thirteen).
    is probably accurate, but unhelpful.
    It may meet lexicographical standards, but not encyclopedic ones. We can ask
    1. What is being imitated?
      I am assuming that ump imitates a transmitted or received dah, probably in the sense that pronouncing "ump-ty" is more likely to approximate the 3:1 length ratio that should exist in the transmitted or received sequence "dah-dit".
    2. What in the world connected it to the numeric meaning?
      I'm really shooting in the dark here: Are telegraphers that linguistically influential? If "ump-ump-ty-(t)ump, for instance, is or was used to coach novices and subordinates in sharpening up the timing in their transmission of the code for Q (dah-dah-di-dah), does that suggest either "umpty-ump" or "umpteen" as the (to a novice?) interminable length of the string of atoms necessary to send a useful msg? Is "umpty" just a (for telegraphers) familiar nonsense sound, associated (like yatta-yatta-yada) with interminability?

--Jerzy•t 10:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The dash was "umpty", not "ump". The dot was "iddy".[1][2] Spacepotato (talk) 18:09, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The -zillions and their kin

I demoted bazillion from the intro of the section, bcz it's only 1/3 as Googlish as gazillion. (And zillion is about 3 times what gazillion is.) I think it's ugly, annoying, and inefficient to have them listed in what is presumably the result of people adding their new entries at the head or foot of the list -- depending on individual social style, i'd guess. (The mind seeks, and if successful, exploits, the order in the list, even if unconsciously.) I think ordering according to declining frequency is the intuitive expectation, and if we aren't going to do that, the list following the intro should be alphabetical, just to avoid readers wasting time unconsciously testing other theories about the order. But i've left it for a while as i found it (except for the switch i've mentioned), in case seeing it in the existing order inspires someone to suss out some kind of pattern i'm missing.
If nothing else is suggested for a while, i'll do the Google checks to put it into declining-GTest order, in the belief that most readers will have some sense of the relative freqency of the top end, and will consider that order confirmed no later than the 4th entry.
--Jerzy•t 11:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it matters in this case, but using Google counts as a measure of popularity/validity/notability is not a good idea, because the counts are often problematic. Personally, I'd put them in alphabetical order.
- DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:53, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Indeed, "often problematic", but far better than nothing, and IMO thus good (unless you have another imperfect measure in mind) as long as we don't stake too much on the result (or encourage others to do so in situations where it'd be less appropriate).
    I think i'd oppose saying in the article anything even close to "listed in order of frequency of use". (But maybe that'd be good in a comment, to encourage adding others either at the bottom, or on the basis of the current GTest scores of the new one and the ones before and after it: i.e., document new entries' positions (in the comments or on the talk page). It could discourage the addition of any example more obscure than the most obscure existing one; IMO, that's worth discouraging.)
    --Jerzy•t 23:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
In fact (to follow up on myself), the more I think about it, the more I think alphabetical order is the way to go - largely because it will be transparent to the reader. These terms don't have natural ordering that is commonly understood (bazillion vs. gazillion?), so any other order will look like a random mishmash, which is what it looks like right now! if you're going to the effort to order them, I'd vote for "alphabetical order"
- DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:57, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree that alpha order (after the 1-to-a-handful in the first sentence, which i hope you don't object to) is fine, if any reasonable commenter (like yourself) continues to object to all attempts at approximating decreasing frequency.
    I unsure what you mean by "don't have natural ordering", and can see three interpretations, each of which i will respond to.
  1. Order in the sense of smallest to largest in absolute meaning. I think authors can have the intention of giving a stronger impression of enormousness, but have little chance of succeeding. I think the real example from the page of "a million billion trillion zillion squillion dollars" succeeds relative to "a zillion dollars" only if the author was going for a strong impression of absurdity. IMO, there's no such thing as absolute-size order.
  2. Order in the sense of smallest to largest in meaning relative to each other. If one kid says "I'm gonna make a gazillion dollars with my idea!", to top it, their buddy has to say something like "Mine is better, i'm gonna make a skillion umptillion dollars!", but if the first says "zillion", then "bazillion" feels more indefinitely large (bcz of the extra syllable) and "godzillion" might work for the third kid ('coz Godzilla rocks). (Cf. Ralphie in Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story, awed by IIRC a jump bid from a double dare to a triple dog dare.) Not a very useful kind of order, especially since subjectivity will be an important factor, and many of these words pretty clearly are equal or indistinguishably different.
  3. Order in the sense of widely to obscurely familiar. The main difficulty here is IMO the enormous one of lack of a good corpus to judge by. Psychologists have trouble, i understand, when interested in how much the topic area affects the speed of recognition of words, agreeing on what to do about such situations as the relative infrequency of "kotex" (or "tampon", i suppose) in published works, despite the frequency with which shoppers pass grocery-store displays of a hundred copies of one or the other word. We learn the most frequent words of the language aurally before we can read, and know many others primarily from hearing and saying them; written sources may not reflect the same frequencies. I think there's a real order there, but we can only see it through a glass darkly.
As to the third kind, i'm encouraged abt that attempt, and i'd like to clarify why:
My immediate impression was that zillion and gazillion predominate. Bazillion strained my credulity much less than ananillion, robillion and julillion (of which at least the last two sound like efforts to feed the vanity of specific children related to the corresponding authors). Are you implying that you don't perceive those six as in anything but random order -- not even as a decreasing-frequency list that eventually degenerates into something indistinguishable from randomness? (That's what a successful decreasing-frequency list should feel like to nearly all readers, no?) The GTests on zillion, gazillion, and bazillion, and a couple or three more that i rated as the next more obscure candidates (but for me not clearly distinguishable in their levels of obscurity) offered me no surprises; that encouraged me that (based on a single-subject, non-blinded experiment!) i was on the right track.
And i want to emphasize again that while i'm talking abt what we do in the article, my goal is not to provide information on frequency rank (let alone frequency per se), but to present the information in the least distracting (let alone annoying) way. This is like eliminating passive voice and shortening sentences, not like verifying and inserting refs.
I hope colleagues will indulge me in the following exercise: i'm gonna go ahead and build the strictly GTest-ordered list, below on this talk page (and without trying to suggest that the effort won't be a waste bcz its use is inevitable: i just don't mind the very possibly wasted effort. I'll put the scores in the comments, so editors can scan the list for plausibility without being subliminally influenced by the scores, and report their reactions. (If you don't report, please look later and reconsider, since those who dislike it are probably more likely to report, producing systematic error.) FWIW, i'm going to post it outside my signed msg, so that anyone is free to convert the list into more of a controlled experiment if they like: will those who view it like it less, if a random entry from one half of the list is exchanged with the corresponding entry in the other half? Will they have an idea abt which pair have been exchanged?
--Jerzy•t 23:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A straw man for us to beat on

Change it as seems useful to you.
--Jerzy•t 00:19, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

  1. zillion
  2. gazillion
  3. bazillion
  4. bajillion
  5. squillion
  6. kabillion
  7. gajillion
  8. skillion
  9. kajillion
  10. gagillion
  11. gadzillion
  12. hojillion
  13. grillion
  14. katrillion
  15. godzillion
  16. robillion
  17. umptillion
  18. gonillion
  19. julillion
  20. ananillion
Except for "zillion" - which had its own article for a while - none of these is common enough IMHO to require any handling other than the most obvious, which I think is alphabetical. It still seems to me that any other order will seem random to readers (and readers are the point, after all). - DavidWBrooks (talk) 00:46, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Somebody (not me) has gone and done it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 10:27, 6 May 2008 (UTC)