h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I mean, L is a bit rubbish, isn't it? It's just weird, coming as it does after XLVII, XLVIII and XLIX. Why can't it be something a bit more, well, impressive?

'There's Icy going off on one of his meaningless rants' I hear you say, but, no! It's absolutely true. Let me explain.

This week, the new American Football season (or if you're American, the new Football season) starts. I wish we had it in the UK - it's far more exciting than Rugby. Anyway, the final match of the season pits the winners of each of the two leagues together in a grand playoff - the Superbowl. This is one game I can watch in the UK - if I stay up until 4am. It's a wonderful carnival of sport, with serious half-time entertainment thrown in. The only thing I can't get is the US TV commercials, which I've heard are pretty impressive.

Anyway, the marketing for this event is huge, and for many years they have designated each Superbowl as a numbered event, using Roman numerals. We've had 49 of them so far, so the events for the last few years were branded as "Superbowl XLVII", "Superbowl XLVIII" and "Superbowl XLIX". It all adds a bit of gladiator to the spectacle.

But now we're at the 50th, well, there's a problem. "Superbowl L" just doesn't cut the mustard. The marketing men have drawn a complete blank.

The solution, they've decided, is to skip a year, and call this one "Superbowl 50".

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11031941/nfl-take-one-year-hiatus-roman-numerals-super-bowl-50

And so the question is this. Can we improve on Roman numerals, and come up with a set of gladiatorially impressive numbers without any gaps? You have until "Superbowl C" to come up with a better system.

Maybe instead we should name them like hurricanes.

Superbowl Allison, Superbowl Bob, Superbowl Claudia, etc.

Why is it called 'Superbowl' anyway if they're not actually bowling? They could change the name each year to include other sport activities that aren't anything to do with American Football. Like 'Superthrow', 'Superputt', 'Superserve', 'Superbreak' etc

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The video on that link explains it - someone confused it with 'super ball' many years ago - the super-bouncy toy ball.

Or maybe that doesn't explain it.

Actually, American football began as a university sport - very snobbish, actually.

And somewhere down the line, they started having intercollegiate matches, usually on winter holidays, around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.

These contests were called 'bowls'. Now, you've got me as to why.

But the bowls have funny names, like 'Sugar Bowl', 'Rose Bowl', etc. The Rose Bowl Parade in California is always an interesting spectacle.

There's also an Orange Bowl and a Peach Bowl.

Oh, and w*k* claims it's from the shape of the stadium, the 'bowl' part.

I'll continue referring to it as the Superb Owl as Stephen Colbert suggested last year in reference to how ruthlessly the NFL prosecutes the use of their trademarks and logos.


Not everyone will be able to view this video.

http://on.cc.com/1h7qSvh

Cool old Guy running reversae
"They could try Superbowl LC or Superbowl XLX or Superbowl XXXXX or Superbowl ILI

SuperAdd SuperFan SuperWatch SuperView"

The name would seem confusing if a race of extraterrestrials brought up on comic books came to this planet. They would think "superbowl" referred to contests between Superman, Wonder Woman, et al.

But as for replacing L with some other letter, you'd have to get permission from the Romans. The Ancient Romans are no longer available to grant permission, so contemporary ones would have to be approached. Anyone seen Sophia Loren lately? ;-0

Well, you might ask His Holiness. The Vatican keeps a current Latin dictionary with all the latest words. As they are practically the only ones who speak it regularly.

Oh. It's more widely used than that.

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I would like to hear the discussion if they tried to get the US Navy to have *prayers*...let alone in Latin....

I would be non-standard, but they could have used XLX which is ten less than sixty.

Or even better, IVXLXVI. That would make a wonderful symmetrical stack, with a huge L in the middle and smaller letters on either side.

The whole thing of putting a smaller number before a bigger one to indicate subtraction wasn't really used by the Romans. They knew what it meant, but they preferred not to use it. So nine was usually written as VIIII for example.

Since the current system really became standard long after the Roman Empire had collapsed (in the West - the Eastern Roman Empire used Greek numerals), there's no reason why we shouldn't expand it to allow an I before a V before an X etc etc.

A short Latin prayer might be "Deo gratias Anglia"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAlIoSCYVDw


[It was all the rage after the battle of Agincourt ]

Come off it guys. A bowl (especially a rose bowl) is just another kind of cup.

And How like them to bottle out of Superbowl L and call it Superbowl 50. I can hardly believe it, but then it shouldn't surprise us.

Wasn't it lovely when the year 2000 arrived, and instead of TV programmes being labelled 'BBC MCMXCIX' we finally got 'BBC MM'.

Similar bottling-out occurs in the numbering of hotel floors: many (especially American) hotels have no thirteenth floor. Hence the wonderfully grim Ogden Nash 'Ballad of the Thirteenth Floor' describing a hotel in which the normally invisible floor XIII appears on Hallowe'en.

One of my favourites, written as a brilliant pastiche of Robert Service. The scary lift-boy brings them up in the lift, sorry, elevator --

Then he squashed the latch like a fungus patch
And revealed the thirteenth floor.

Can't be smug though; my own government gave permission to car marketers to avoid all car registrations beginning with the number 13 two years ago. Since 1988 all Dublin cars have been 88-D-1234 or whatever, but nobody wants to buy a 13-D car (?) so they changed the registration period to 131-D for January to June and 132-D for July to December. Now they're stuck with it, so my Leaf is 151-D-29621. Humbug.

Absolutely true, all of it. And you've given me an idea for a guide entry, thanks...

My father lived in an apartment block with 16 apartments numbered 1 to 17 without a 13.

MR James wrote a ghost story about a hotel in Denmark which by day had rooms 12 and 14 with 3 windows each, but in the middle of the night there only 2 windows, and the people in the room next door seemed to be making a lot of noise.

And in China, it's the 14th floor that gets omitted, because the word for 14 sounds too much like the term for "certain death."

Often in the UK 13 is replaced by 12a. My Dad's lived at a genuine number 13 for two and a half decades.

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