Thursday, February 02, 2012

Those thingies mean years


Below is submitter Betsy's explanation of the above image:


When I picked up the cake for my Grams' 93rd birthday, I was puzzled as to why the Wal-Mart folks put end quotation marks after the 93s.   
93 inches?  Why the heck does it have 93 inches written on it?
When I asked, the reply was, "Those two thingies after a number means years".
I could have argued until the cows came home, but the gal was insistent about 93 years.


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8 comments:

  1. Julie2/2/12 11:51 AM

    This belongs on Cakewrecks!

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  2. Jan Arzooman2/2/12 11:57 AM

    I would have made them do another cake. Anyone working in the business of using words, even decorating cakes, needs to know how to write. "Those thingies mean years"? -- where?

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  3. 67drake2/2/12 2:46 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. 67drake2/2/12 2:50 PM

    You should have told them if they don't fix the typo you'll come back with your 7' 9" grandmother to straiten things out.

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  5. Vicki2/2/12 4:44 PM

    Jan A. - I'm afraid that people who decorate cakes are working in the business of using icing, not words. See Cakewrecks if you don't agree.

    I'll have to remember that "those thingies mean years".

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  6. hopita2/2/12 4:54 PM

    I actually googled this to see if maybe there was some obscure use of quotation marks as shorthand for a period of time. And there is! Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_mark), "In regard to time, a single hatch mark indicates minutes and a double hatch mark indicates seconds..." So it *could* be read as indicating that your Grandmother is 93 seconds old, which is still, obviously, incorrect.

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  7. Lynn3/2/12 6:50 AM

    Presumably the person was thinking of the convention of using an apostrophe (not "thingies") to abbreviate a date (as in '93 instead of 1993). It reflects how illiterate many people are that she doesn't understand why that works, and all she knows is it has something to do with years.

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  8. bethany3/2/12 8:23 AM

    Good hypothesis Lynn. I thought she might have gotten confused with the convention of using hashmarks to write inches (as the submitter suggested). Your explanation gives a good reason why she'd think punctuation has anything to do with writing years.

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