Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

In honor of this being the one hundredth blog post on this site, I thought we’d take a look at the cent. Of course, we could start with the lowly copper penny, but I was thinking more along the lines of things with ‘cent’ in them.

We all know that there are one hundred pennies in a dollar, hence the term one cent. Cent comes from the Latin word for one hundred, and it gets used more often in English than you might realize. Not only is it part of our monetary system, we run most of our business and education on the basis of percentages.

Percent was once ‘per cent’ or literally, ‘each hundred’. So if twenty percent of people bought your newest book, then twenty out of every one hundred people would have read it.

Centuries are one hundred years. Centimeter and centigrade involve measurements on the one hundred scale. I could go on, but to me the real question is why we see one hundred as such a special number.

It is easy to see why we might measure things in twos or in tens. After all, most of us start life with two eyes, two ears, two hands and two feet. Fingers and toes come in tens, and that’s where most of us learn to count.

We have a special fondness, though, for doubles. I mean, we take the number seven to be a magical number, both in folk lore and in some religions. So the seventh son of someone was believed to be lucky. If, however, you are born the seventh son of a seventh son, then you are just all kinds of lucky.

Magical formulae are no different, often involving a certain number of repetitions depending on the desired end result. If you need the result to be urgent, or stronger, then instead of say seven repetitions, you may repeat seven sets of seven incantations.

This doesn’t stop with magic, many more mainstream religions use the same formula in their prayers.

Don’t think I’m denigrating any of this, I’m not. Just trying to get to why we as people find this to be important. I have my theories, and since you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll indulge me a bit longer while I share why I think one hundred is so important to us.

You see, I think that we feel ten to be, well, complete. After all, once we’ve got ten things, we’ve run out of fingers to count them on, so we must be done. Ten feels whole. It feels good. It feels finished.

Finished, though, that isn’t good enough for us as a species. Let’s face it, humans don’t settle for having enough, we never have. Why have enough when you can have more than enough? And yet, we all want to be done, even if we can’t quite feel satisfied.

That’s where that second set of ten comes in. If ten feels complete, but we still itch for something more, then surely ten sets of ten will be the completeness we’re actually seeking. Perhaps it is a bit of magic, or a touch of prayer, or just a desperate effort to convince that yawning pit inside us that we’ve actually accomplished something.

Funny thing is, no matter how frustrating it is to try to fill that void, and how much we want it filled so we can rest a bit, it is that same restlessness that drives us to succeed. Sure, it may leave us feeling insecure, and rob us of our sleep, but it also spurs us onward to our greatest achievements.

Cheers,

Michelle