If numbers had a stratified civilization similar to the one human beings operate under, there’s little doubt that 24 would be one of numerical society’s elite.
Omitting the first Sunday in November and the second Sunday in March, each day of the calendar year in the United States consists of precisely 24 hours. And for people living in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U. S. Virgin Islands, and the portions of Arizona that aren’t part of the Navajo nation, every day has 24 hours, since those folks don’t do Daylight Saving Time.
A standard human body has 24 ribs in it.
The purest gold is rated 24-karat.
Four factorial (4 times 3 times 2 times 1) comes out to 24.
For event planners, gym teachers, camp counselors, human resource managers, group dynamics facilitators, harried parents, or anyone else needing to split people and/or items into perfectly balanced groups from time to time, 24 is the ideal number. Twenty-four cupcakes, 24 pencils, 24 marbles, 24 Pokémon cards, 24 cherry tomatoes, 24 Easter Eggs, 24 pineapple life savers, 24 pickup hockey players, or 24 of anything else needing to be distributed uniformly can be evenly divided into 12 pairs, eight trios, a half-dozen tetrads, four ensembles of two trios, three octets, two dozens or, if all those involved agree, one gaggle of 24.
After brief, early-career flirtations with numbers 8 and 14, baseball’s most accomplished center fielder, Willie Mays, wore uniform number 24 in every contest he participated in, from May 28, 1951 to his final game on October 16, 1974. Another elite athlete who jersey number 24: basketball legend Kobe Bryant.
Anyone who has ever eaten broccoli, potatoes, beef, mushrooms, turkey, bananas or apples is connected to 24, since that’s the atomic number for chromium, an element found in all the above-mentioned items. And those who eschew broccoli, potatoes, beef, mushrooms, turkey, bananas and apples are indebted to 24 as well, since chances are they’ve used, directly or indirectly, things with chromium in them. This list includes items such as cement, eyeliner, cutlery, leather belts or wallets, certain cleaning products, and the stainless-steel items necessary to prepare whatever foods not containing broccoli, potatoes, beef, mushrooms, turkey, bananas or apples they actually do eat.
English-speaking peoples have long and justifiably emulated the ancient Greeks, since they originated the pillars of the scientific, medical, philosophical, artistic, and logical foundations of today’s society. They also pioneered such vital elements of modern western civilization as civic debate, and rule by democracy.
And even more remarkably, they accomplished all of that with an alphabet consisting of just 24 letters.
The current English-language alphabet contains 26 letters, and has for as long as anyone can remember. But it’s abundantly clear we’d be better off with 24.
To get the English alphabet down to the ideal number two letters need elimination. But which pair has to go?
Deciding which two letters to vote off the alphabetic island is easy. Looking over a random 600-word essay and seeing which two letters never appear would suffice. A kwick ecksamination of this one makes things kwite clear. There’s no kwestion the first letter needing ecksizing is cue, and the other is ecks.
Ecksassperated Tecksans and New Mecksicans will probably kwivver with vecksation at this criteek. They’ll no doubt want two different letters acksed, but such skwauks are easily kwashed. Who would even notice if these two letters ecksitted from our alphabet? Let’s face it: ecks and cue are both eckstravagances. These two antikwaited anteeks should both kwiyettlee eckspire. They’re no longer reekwired in America’s lecksicon.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
Font size: