Daily Dose of English 111
111
Daily Dose of English 111
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about 1-1-1. sort of a weird episode title, but I saw that this was the 111th episode. And so I thought that we would talk a little bit about that sort of number. And what I mean by that sort of number is repeating numbers or one, one, one, or things like that, that I find sort of fun and interesting, I guess. And so starting off, we have these sort of fun numbers, which you might think of things that repeat or are palindromes. Palindromes are things that are the same forwards and backwards. So 111 forwards is 111 and 111 backwards is also 111. So it's a palindrome. There are lots of numbers that are palindromes, things like one, two, one, right? There's tons of them and lots of words too. In fact, there are some fun ones, right? Thinking of race car or taco cat is also a palindrome. If you spell it forwards and backwards, it's the same. There's also some longer ones. You can probably look up something like longest palindrome and get some interesting sentences. One that I remember is, sit on a potato pan, Otis, which is a palindrome sentence. If you spell it backwards, it's the exact same. Spaces don't count though, you have to change that a little bit. But yeah, they're sort of fun to do and whenever you notice a palindrome, they're kind of satisfying, I guess you could say. And we're going to actually have a couple of palindromes every 10 episodes, actually, in this bracket of 1, 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 4, 1, that sort of thing. But I don't really want to talk about palindromes. I wanted to talk more about these repeating numbers because those, at least in the US, feel sort of lucky. So things like 1-1-1-1, right? 1-11 or 11-11 at a.m. or p.m. You get 1-1-1-1 and that's sort of a fun time of day, right? You get this one moment where it's all the same thing and to us that sort of scene is lucky. Same if it's like 2-22 or 3-33. Those sorts of times or even dates can be really fun. And I actually remember during a lot of my, one of the reasons that, brother, hang on. One of the reasons that I think of these is because we've always mentioned it in my family, and growing up, my dad would wake me up for school, and if it was a fun date, he would usually tell me. And so I remember being woken up on September 11th, 2011, Uh, because that was one, one, one, one, one, one. Uh, the date was that if you write it in, in, uh, without the two, two, zero, one, one. And that, that day at 1111, it was one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one. No, wait, hang on. One, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one. There we go. Uh, that's a lot of ones. and the exact date and time, which is cool. And like, so just thinking about those numbers, I think is something that a good amount of people in the US, at least, I'm not sure if it's a thing where you're from, let me know down in the comments if people like specific numbers or avoid specific numbers, for example, because this like repeating number thing is seen as lucky and that sort of thing. If you look at sports uniforms, so like their jersey number, which is the number on somebody's back when they're playing a sport. you'll see a lot of repeating numbers. A lot of people choose things like 44, 22, 11, 00 is a pretty famous one, and those sorts of numbers are quite well-known because they're, sorry, not quite well-known, rather, they're very popular, especially among amateurs, like if you're not professional, when you can just kind of make up a number, whatever, it doesn't matter, it can be really fun to be number 33 or 44. It's also fun to find them in the wild. There's a lot of people that enjoy looking for specific number combinations in the real world, either on license plates of cars, on signs, on barcodes, wherever you can find numbers, it can be sort of a fun thing, because you sort of pick a number, that's your number, and you look for it, and you find it, and you collect examples of it, maybe. And there's actually a, somebody's been collecting 37s for basically his whole life. He's got a blog and a website where he collects hundreds of thousands of examples of the number 37. Uh, because, and there's a fun YouTube video about this. Apparently the number 37 to humans feels random. Like we have this thing in our mind where not the number 37 and 73 feel sort of random to us. And so we're more likely to select it as being random. Same thing between 1 and 10, we feel like 3 and 7 are more random, and then between 1 and 100, 37 and 73 are the most commonly picked that are actually random. There's real numbers that have a reason for being picked, but people feel like 37 is just a random number more often. which I've always found is interesting. Or not always, I recently learned about this a couple months ago, but I had noticed it too with my friend, one of my friends growing up, he would very frequently have to come up with like random number and I don't remember why this stuck with me but like I mean we say that all the time right if you have to think of a random number of things that sounds funny he would almost always use 17 almost always and I noticed this because it was just so so common and to me it was a little weird like why are you always saying 17 it's not random if you always say 17 but anyways and I think things like 1 1 1 and 2 2 2 feel a bit What's a good word? Not unique, but like novel. That's a good word. Something that's novel is something that feels a little cool or interesting because it's not common. Um, so like a novel experience is like doing something normal, but that you don't do that often. Right. So nowadays for some people, a novel experience might be going to the movie theater, um, because you don't often go to the movie theater. Most people don't anymore, which is sort of too bad. It's, it's fun. Um, although at least in the U S it's really expensive. Um, I don't, I don't know how much it costs to go to the movie theater, um, where you're from, but I remember a couple of years ago, so probably it was before, uh, COVID happened. So it must've been like 2018 or 2019. Um, I don't remember. Was it? Ah, whatever, okay. The point is that I remember going on a movie date, which is sort of a common, classic American date idea, is to go dinner and a movie. You probably have heard that before, right? Dinner and a movie is like the typical date idea. And it can be really fun. But I remember that I went and there was two of us. We went for a pretty simple, cheap meal, right? It was just like, I think it was just Mexican food. And that was like 30 bucks between two people, 30 US dollars. And then the movie for two tickets, which are like $18 each, maybe a little less if you can get it, plus some popcorn, right? And not that much. It was like 70 or 80 US dollars total. The movie I think was like $50 total and the dinner was almost 30. And so like, I think it was actually over 80 US dollars for a simple, relatively cheap movie dinner date. And if you count in like how much gas cost and that sort of thing, it's kind of starting to approach $100 for the most basic date idea that you can think of. Um, and wages are higher in the U S it's one of the most wealthy countries in the world, but this data idea is meant to be for like 17 year olds, 18 year olds, right? Not people that are working jobs where they earn, you can earn a hundred dollars in a day or whatever. Um, I, okay, I got, went off on a tangent, but the point is that, wait, what is the point? I don't know why I talked about that. Whatever. Um, anyways, let me know how much a movie, a date would cost to where you're from. I'm curious. Um, um, but yeah, what was I talking about? One, one, one. God, what a weird episode. Anyways. Um, But yeah, so I like the numbers 111 and things like that 1111 is a more time of day that I enjoy not for any real reason other than the fact that it's kind of fun and I like looking out for dates as well right like December. So we do month, day, then year. Sorry for everybody that does it the way that's more logical, but that's how I think about it. So December 21st is 1-2-2-1. That's a fun one. I remember that being in 2021. So that was December 21st, 21. What was it? 1-2-2-1-1-2. No, other way around. 1-2, geez, 1-2-2-1-2-1 was fun. Anyways, I'm rambling at this point. I talked about movies for like two minutes, three, four minutes. I'm losing my mind, I guess. But anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this episode and I gave you a couple of things to comment about. So make sure to let me know what you think. And I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen. And I hope that you learned a little something here and there, and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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