This is not 108

A thought recently popped into my head that blew my mind a little.

Facebook was advertising Mala beads to me, which have 108 beads. Some people say it's because 1 has a certain meaning, 0 has a certain meaning and 8 has a certain meaning.

But I suddenly realised (late to the game, I know, but maths isn't my strength) one hundred and eight and one-zero-eight aren't the same thing.

One is an amount, the other a sequence or a series. You could replace 108 as a number with a word that means one hundred and eight things (I shall call it "a shiffle" - as in, a set of Mala beads consists of a shiffle of beads, and a shiffle of onions is way too many onions). Where as I could replace the sequence 108 with any series of words or symbols (starfish-apricot-tractor).

It gets even further away from numbers when you think of 108 as being (as the yoga magazine I read recently suggested) that it's sort of a sequence of actual symbols. A solid line for ultimate truth, A circle for inherent emptiness, and an infinite loop for timelessness. Or the classic binary sequence of 1 (everything) 0 (nothing) plus infinity (it's an infinity symbol on it's side). So you could have exactly three beads and it would still "mean" 108.

108 and 108 (and, possibly, 108) are two (maybe three) completely different things that just happen to share the same three figures (and the same set of beads).

And now I'm going down a Derridan wormhole if signifier/signified, phenomenonolgy vs structuralism crap, and I really need to get more sleep.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

A leash is a brace and a half

Something I learned today: Brace (two), leash/lease (three), dozen (twelve), score (20), century (100) are known as "secondary numerals". Exclusive numerals (one, two, three, etc) sort of concrete in a language and don't change - the proper English word for "two" is always "two" - but secondary numerals let us play with the language, so instead of two we could have a brace, a couple or a pair. These are also words for sets of a particular number, rather than actual numbers, which is why you refer to them as "a brace" and "a dozen" and why you can count them even though they already refer to numbers - "a leash is a brace and a half", "three score years and ten". Depending on your dialect of English, they have irregular plurals (like deer, sheep and fish), so you have "three dozen", "five score", or "two pair", but several "dozens", "scores" or "pairs". But now I'm wondering if "a pair of braces" is redundant, because "pair" means two and "brace" means two, or if the word "braces" in this context means "something that braces" - as in supports...