Cashback. That’s a peculiar word, isn’t it? What began as, “Would you like cash back?” has morphed into, “Would you like cashback?” – cashback being not just any old cash but the cash you get back from the checkout… even though it looks exactly the same as all other cash.
Sooner or later you’ll find yourself in a situation where somebody takes your cashback by mistake and you have to ask for your cashback back.
Anyway, that’s by the by. I recently asked for £20 cashback and the lady at the checkout came back with, “Twenty – two zero?” I said, “No, twenty – nine five.” Actually, I didn’t. I’m not that facetious and, even if I was, you never think of these things till after the event, do you?
Twenty – what a great number. it doesn’t sound like any other number, does it? In fact, there’s only one word in English that rhymes with twenty and that’s plenty. In many cases twenty is plenty, but that’s just coincidental. Unlike thirty, which could be mistaken for thirteen, or forty for fourteen, fifty for fifteen etc, there is no such issue with twenty. It certainly sounds nothing like twelve.
Twenty is special. Until fairly recently it was the basis for counting in many civilisations across the world, certainly those that liked to count on their fingers and toes. The French, for example. They were particularly fond of the vigesimal (base 20) counting system and still insist on calling 80 ‘quatre-vingts’ (four twenties) and pursuing that crazy logic all the way up to 99.
But it wasn’t so long ago that English speakers were using the same method. “Four score years and seven ago…” began Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 address at Gettysburg. Four score years and seven – that’s 87 to you, mate. The term ‘score’ for 20 originates from the farming practice of counting sheep using notches in a stick. For every 20 sheep the shepherd – provided he hadn’t nodded off – scored a notch in the stick.
It wasn’t quite cloud-based inventory software but it served the purpose. And it gave us the word ‘score’, without which we wouldn’t have football.
