But all this was when I used to watch TV. But recently, just to while away a few days of boredom, I got all 9 season DVDs (or, dvd-rips) of Southpark. It seemed an inexhaustible source of entertainment. But, it did exhaust and so I started researching for the top rated shows on Tv. Thus I started and obtained all seasons of Smallville (Kill Lana Lang. Please!), Lost, MythBusters, Prison Break, Simpsons and, recently, 24 (Die Kim Bauer, die. And I'm not talking German).
Now that we've gotten all that over with, we can come to the topic. In one of the '24' episodes, Bouer says "niner" when reading out a number. Now, I've heard niner being used before and I assumed that agency guys used it to be as clear in spite of pronunciation differences on the phone(it would be an under statement to say that they use phones too much on the show), but I wanted to see if other cardinals had such different ways of saying them.
It seems that 'niner' belongs to the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, or Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. The familiar Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and other designations are also a subset of this alphabet. Only 3, 5 and 9 have different pronunciations ("tree", "fife", and "niner") but all the numbers have a code word to it too. [link]
| Nadazero | NAH-DAH-ZAY-ROH |
| Unaone | OO-NAH-WUN |
| Bissotwo | BEES-SOH-TOO |
| Terrathree | TAY-RAH-TREE |
| Kartefour | KAR-TAY-FOWER |
| Pantafive | PAN-TAH-FIVE |
| Soxisix | SOK-SEE-SIX |
| Setteseven | SAY-TAY-SEVEN |
| Oktoeight | OK-TOH-AIT |
| Novenine | NO-VAY-NINER |
Finally, I fired up my trusty WordWeb dictionary and typed in a cardinal. It seems that it's not just the agencies that use different words for numbers. Each number has quite a few familiar as well as a few quirky synonyms to it. I've left out the very obvious ones in an attempt to make this at least a bit interesting.
| 1 | Ane, Ace |
| 2 | Deuce |
| 3 | Deuce-ace, leash, tercet, ternion, terzetto, tierce, trey, trine, troika |
| 4 | foursome, Little Joe, quatern, quaternity, tetrad |
| 5 | Cinque, fin, Little Phoebe, Phoebe, Pentad, quint, quintet |
| 6 | Captain Hicks, Hexad, seset, sextet, sise, sixer |
| 7 | septet, sevener, heptad |
| 8 | Eighter from Decataur, Octad, Octonary, Ogdoad |
| 9 | Nina from Carolina, Niner, Ennead |
A casual google didn't reveal much on the origins on some of the interesting sounding words. But some of the synonyms seem to be a homophonic play on the number's pronunciation, like Captain Hicks (hicks->six) and Nina from Carolina (nina->nine). I can see quite a few french derived words too, like Ane (french='un'), trey (french='trois'), Cinque (french='cinq') and sise (french='six' pronounced 'seese'). Since I am not in touch with the english speaking world, some or most of the mentioned words may be in contemporary use and I probably guessed the origins wrongly too. Do comment.
