…except when it is.
Mark – a pretty funny guy – is mocking IQ45’s misunderstanding of “hundredth”. Follows that by incorrectly using an apostrophe to pluralize SAT (it should be simply “SATs”). Why do so many struggle with the apostrophe? I wonder.
I’ve seen this “1/100th” thing a few times lately. It’s not clear that all of them are mocking the big balding baby. Where does that confusion come from? Here’s my conjecture.
| Fraction or Ordinal | English Phrase Examples |
| 1/2 | “one half”, “a half”, “half of the time” |
| 2nd | “it was the second time this had happened” |
| 1/3 | “one third”, “a third of a cup” |
| 3rd | “made it to third base” |
| 1/100 | “one hundredth”, “one percent” |
| 100th | “for the hundredth time” |
Usually, the spell-it-out word for the ordinal is the same word used for the fraction, but not always. And without already knowing about baseball (or looking at the field), one would not know that making it to third base means you’ve achieved 75% of your goal, not 33%. (Ponders reworking baseball to have nine bases so third base is a third of the trip.)
Why did we stop at “second” v “half” and fail to come up with different words for the remaining ordinals as opposed to the fractions? Too lazy?
Well, such as it is, it’s about context. “hundredth” can mean two very different (4 orders of magnitude different) things depending on the context. And on Twitter, where we’re oft forced to come up with ridiculous shorthand in order to squeeze the point into the character limit, we often have no choice but to lose context. “That was the hundredth mile I’ve walked this month.” That would be unheard of, for me, but is one or two weeks’ worth for an avid hiker in decent shape. But my back yard shed where I sit and smoke my pipe and watch YouTube (et al) is about a hundredth of a mile away, i.e. about 53 feet from the sliding glass door on the back of the house. (That’s 4 orders of magnitude I’m happy to live with.)
Back to the idiot in the White House and his Machiavellian tweet…
“100th” is five characters.
“1/100th” is seven characters.
“hundredth” is nine characters.
I copy-n-pasted IQ45’s tweet the way I suspect he typed it at first, where it started with “For the hundredth time,” and it is 281 characters. So the troglodyte-in-chief got all diarrhea-panicked looking for a way to save at least one character so he could puke forth his vile stupidity in a goddamned hurry.
The White House’s Skid-mark already had “and” in there, and could’ve saved 2 characters by simply replacing that with “&”. Alas, no, he didn’t see that option. He could’ve changed “40,000,000” to “40 mil” or “20,000,000” to “20 mil”, but he cannot stand to lose zeroes. you know how he loves big numbers. Big numbers make the mushroom poof a little cloud of spores into his Depends.
So, not understanding how numbers actually work, the fourth-Reich-failure changed “hundredth” to “1/100th”, saving two characters, so he could mash the Send Tweet button.
I think Dementia is setting in, which is really sad. I would’ve preferred for him to be sharp-as-a-tack lucid when it all comes crashing down. He should feel accurately and acutely how globally reviled he is. Then cage him somewhere along the Southern border, separated from his family (also in cages there) and serve him gruel with larvae in it… until he is dead.
