I was Thinking About Twelve

I was thinking about twelve. What a strange word it is. How it gets another word all its own: dozen. How many numbers get that kind of special treatment? Two gets it multiple ways if you’re creative: a couple, obviously, but also a pair, a duo… Three is “several” in my book, but also “a few.” (Thank God for the word few!) How much is a handful? Depends on the hand. Johnny Bench could palm seven baseballs at once. Ten you’d think would qualify for something nice… But after three you have to leap all the way to twelve. And after twelve, unless you count “score” (and I’m not sure I do), are there any other special words in common usage for numbers? Does anyone use “gross” anymore in the old way, i.e. twelve twelve times (or 12-squared), a.k.a. 144? We have lots of ways to say 100 (lots, scads, lashes, loads—words readymade to hold any multiplicity, Hermione’s handbags, catchalls) but they’re all married to time and money (a Benjamin, a century, a C-note, a bill). 100 by itself (if that is a grammatically allowable construction, which I’m not sure it is, because oughtn’t it be better said “100 by themselves”?) stands with all the rest of the anonymous digits, unreflected by a non-numerical counterpart. But twelve? 

Even the naked word is quite odd. How many in English begin with “tw”? Numbers again spring to mind with two and twice. Twin. Tweek. (Newly) twerk. Tween. The onomotopoetic tweet. Twit. Certainly twerp (ahem). Tweeze, tweezers. Is that it? For this piece, we will be relying largely on analogue sources (not wholly [“whole” being a word built around a circle—or is it a zero—that encompasses everything, or delimits everything, or both at the same time—like a hole] but largely [which we may think of in this moment as consisting of thousands, in the way that five large denotes $5,000]). The dictionary confronts us immediately with an embarrassing quantity of overlooked beauties, veritably twinkling: twaddle, twang, tweed and twilight, to name a few. Twist brings a twinge to the face of this twat. And yet there really are only a few (that marvelous word again!): not two full-pages between tv dinner and tycoon.

Things really get nuts there for a moment, with twelve. One, two, three…no problem…eight, yeah, you bet…ten (*yawn*), eleven (interesting, but presaged four ticks prior) then twelve—*record scratch*—whatthefuck? Consulting the rhyming dictionary we experience a grim satisfaction: Yes, delve and shelve, saw those coming. Helve’s a tad archaic, don’t you think? (If something can be a “tad” “archaic”...just a touch ancient.) While dissolve, involve, revolve, etc.? I don’t think so. Not with this accent, rhyming dictionary! (It’s an absolute lark though, darling, to pronounce twelve as though it rhymed with “solve”, especially while rolling through the ordinary sequence: ten, eleven, twolve, thirteen, and so on.)

On twins: How sneaky and peculiar is it that in the endless catalogue of human faces, the only ones that reliably surprise us are the duplicates? What if Minneapolis and St. Paul really were twin cities? PANIC. BURN THEM DOWN. 

Why did Jesus stop drafting at twelve? H.R. issues? Too many cooks in the kitchen? He’d filled out his soccer team? (There are eleven to a team, yes, but he no doubt anticipated Judas’s caprice.) Whatever the reason, it’s suggested that juries are twelve to mirror the apostles. Possibly they couldn’t stuff any more into the box. Possibly 13 was one too many angry men; 11 one too few (that enchanting word again!). A commentator on a law blog, responding to the question: Why twelve jurors?, handsomely proposes “because twelve is an ancient and enduring symbol of completeness and symmetry.” But why? 

A year is a year because that’s how long it takes to circle once around the sun. A year is made of months because that’s how long it takes the moon to do one of her cycles. (The word, like Monday, derives from “moon”.) Proto-Iraqis in Babylon, dead so long their genes must have made it into all of us by now, carved the starry night into twelve astrological houses in order to rhyme with the scheme of lunar months. A day is a charmingly intuitive unit of time to make sense of. (Every morning with this let-there-be-light business! This exhausting miracle!) Hours are more elusive. 

I recently learned from Seb Falk’s Light Ages: The Surprising History of Medieval Science the walloping truth that hours, for most of human history, were of unequal length. They floated on light’s wax and wane, its spring tides and neap. Not until mechanical clocks made standardization possible did we standardize. Before that, every day had twelve hours of daylight in it and twelve hours of night, and “one hour” was  a twelfth of either. (Ridiculous word: twelfth. Say it!) This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why there should be 24 in a day to begin with. Of course there are 24 if an hour is 60 minutes and a minute sixty seconds, there being only so many seconds in a day after all…but those durations are arbitrary. We might just as well have settled on a more capacious second, a roomier minute, a more forgiving hour, might just as well have made a day six hours or three (one for every meal, say). We could have decided it was important to break time into wacky primes or bland, efficient sets of ten. 

The foot, perhaps, instructs. We live in a practical world, but it used to be practicaler. Cursory googling reveals that basically every society since the dawn of societies employed the foot as a baseline unit of measurement. Because patriarchy, we invariably based our foot on the actual feet of Great Men—which, I have just learned, are equal to roughly 15% their height (the length of the foot is equal to 15% their height, that is…I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that 15% of our height overall was in our feet, which would have made for a drastically different sneaker culture). The English foot, which bequeathed America its good American foot, was based on Henry I’s foot. We can ascertain that he was a tall man, or ungainly of hoof. So a foot became twelve inches (an inch being the width of the Royal Thumb). Did 24 proceed from such earthy foundations? Or was it prophetically intended to give Keifer Sutherland something to do in the Aughts? 

My first guess was that we divided night and day into twelves to reflect the cycles of the moon, but ChatGPT politely swatted me down: “Historical evidence directly linking the 12-hour division of the day to lunar cycles isn’t robust,” it said. Next it occurred to me that every hour planet Earth spins 15°; possibly early astronomers, keen to the night sky’s smooth and ceaseless scrolling, tied the unit of an hour to the distance traversed. But that only led me to the question of why 360-degrees to begin with? Why 360? Another arbitrary number! If we’d wanted a circle to feel akin to a year, why not actually give it 365 degrees? (Or, if you want to be precise about it, and I kinda do, 365.25 degrees?) 

I asked the internet. Here’s what it told me under the heading **CONVENIENCE**: “360 is a highly composite number, meaning it has many divisors (24, to be exact.)” (Underlined emboldened italics added by meeeeeeeee, bitchessssss!) 

Those proto-Iraqis knew what they were doing: they wanted a circle to feel like a year but for the maths to be clean. They employed (and here I give another tip of the hat to Seb Falk’s Light Ages) a sexagesimal system of numeric notation. Sexagesimal notation predates the Hindu-Arabic numerals globally used every day without a second thought by 8 billion people who otherwise can’t agree on shit. Sexagesimal notation was a base-60 system (meaning there were sixty discrete, nonrepeating marks that signified numbers; for comparison, our Hindu-Arabic system is base-10, our English alphabet is base-26). Base-60 seems clunky and alien but it lives on, thrives even, in our mapping of time and space: hours and degrees are still rendered in 60-chunk bundles of minutes and seconds. 360 is the most composite number closest to the number of days in a year. How thrilled they must have been, how toasty with revelation, upon finding exactly 24 numbers that multiplied evenly into 360—just exactly twice-twelve, twice that perfect number of celestial symmetry and completeness. How natural, then, to slice the pie of a day into 24 pieces divided equally between dominions of sun and moon.

*

I just read this to Arielle. She submitted that the answer to my question: How much is a handful? is obvious. “I’m a handful,” she said. “End with that.” 

*Do it before you know how hard it is.*