Ten or two again

I agree that the best way is to let the person read the joke, but the reason the question came up for me is that I was telling someone on the phone about my new sweatshirt (that has the joke on it), and I wasn't sure how to say it to preserve the joke. And that got me to thinking about a logic class I took. My teacher would write

4

on the board, and ask us what that was. We would dutifully say, "four" or "the number four", but the answer is that that is the numeral four. Where does the number four live? In Platonic heaven. (That is, the number four is not something that has an actual physical presence, but is an idea.)

So on that note, "10" is the numeral (or set of numerals) that is pronounced in English "ten". That set of numerals is used to denote the number that is 1 times the base plus 0. So in base 2, "10" denotes the same value as base 10's 2, in base 8, "10" denotes 8₁₀, and so on. (Or, more simply, 10_x = X₁₀.)

So I would say that in English, in the joke, the correct way to pronounce "10" is "ten", but to maintain the joke, saying "one zero" is funnier. (Since "10₂" is pronounced "ten sub two", that would blow the joke entirely. And it's all about the joke.)

My new word

The word for today is "solecism", via Joe Haldeman's blog. "Solecism" means, more or less, a word that is commonly misused, like using "schizophrenic" to mean having split personalities, when it really means have a mental break with reality so that you can't tell reality from your own illusions (more or less). Another example of a solecism that Joe used was "acronym". An acronym is the first letters of a phrase that can be pronounced and used as a word in the phrase's place, and is not the first letters of a phrase that are pronounced as letters to replace the phrase. For example, FUBAR, NATO, and LASER are acronyms. ATM, IBM, and HTML are not.

As Spock would say, "Fascinating."