Three one-hundredths of a second

[spamsink]

(Somewhat prompted by watching the Olympics.)

Why is that silly redundancy there in "three one-hundredths of a second"? Nobody says "two one-thirds of a second", or "four one-tenths of a second"; what so special in 100 as the denominator

Comments

[alexanderr]

> ...As a L2 English speaker...

should it be "As an L2 English speaker" ?

[spamsink]

No, "L2" is pronounced as "non-native", it starts with a consonant. :)

[alexanderr]

my comment was not totally radnom, by the way.

the point was: "an L2" sounds better.
same as "one-hundredth".

also, I think "hundredths" could be too close to "hundreds".
so the redundancy is needed to avoid errors, similar to error correcting codes.
they require some overhead as well

[spamsink]

could be too close to "hundreds"

That's largely irrelevant. 300 is "three hundred", not "three hundreds"; no possibility for an error there.

[alexanderr]

yeah, that is wrong, but I heard something like "a couple of hundreds" many times

or maybe you are just saying "hundreds of seconds" ?

[spamsink]

"of a second" and "of seconds" are sufficiently distinct.

[alexanderr]

right. there's no logic then!
is that so surprising?