Beyond the Surface: The Surprising Subjectivity hidden in Numbers
Cultural hangovers, perceptual variances and historical accidents and their impact on the interpretation of numbers
In December last year, the South Korean government passed a decree to bring in usage of a person’s international age in official documents. Unless you are from South Korea, the international age is what you are used to — be zero years old when you are born and add an year for each birthday.
Instead, Korean age starts at one on the day the person is born, and adds a year as soon as the calendar year turns. This can lead to some bizarre situations — someone born on 31st December will be 2 years old on 1st of January. Talk about growing up fast!
This got me thinking on how seemingly objective truths, like one’s age, can be subject to interpretations by peculiarities of cultures, geographies and their history.
Then, I chanced upon a similar example closer home.
I recently moved to Vancouver and the house we rented is on the 7th floor. If I were to tell this to anyone back in India, they would instantly picture a high rise, stack up seven storeys and then place our floor on top of that. They will, however, be wrong on multiple levels (pun intended).
Conventionally, Indian buildings number the lowest floor as 0 and count upwards, while that would be the 1st floor in Canada. More singularly, in apartments dominated or constructed by Asians, including our building, the 4th floor is skipped — this is called Tetraphobia and seems to have originated thanks to ‘four’ and ‘death’ sounding similar in Mandarin.
So, our seventh floor would be the fifth floor for someone in India.
Talking of daily lives, I am sure you are familiar with the Starbucks sizes of tall, grande, venti and trenta (Italian for thirty). For some reason, grande isn’t really the “grandest” size, and trenta is actually 31oz, not 30.
And it’s not just ages, floors and coffee cups. Our oft-used, global measures of time are seeped in historical subjectivity too.
Sure, a year is measured by a the earth’s motion around the sun, and a day by its spin around its axis, but what about a week? Why seven days? A Lunar cycle is 29.5 days — why not round it to 30 and split into segments of 5 or 6? Someone wrote a book about this, fairly recently.
Not to mention, we just welcomed the year 2023 — the reference point of 0 being an unimportant point in the billion year history of the earth when someone started counting.
What’s important, however, is to remember that time is relative. Just as Einstein never said, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours.”
