You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

One of our Australian listeners is Rob McAhill, and he lives in Cairns, Queensland,

and shared with us a little poem that he learned from his grandfather.

Now, the first time I read it, I completely misunderstood it.

It's a mixture of numerals and letters. And I'm going to try this.

I don't know how it's going to work in audio, but I'm going to try it. I read it as 11 was one racehorse,

22 was 12, 1,111 race, 22, 112, which makes no sense, right?

No, but I think I know where it's going.

You think, you know?

Yeah.

You think there might have been two racehorses, one named 11 and another named 22?

Right.

Yeah.

If you read it that way, it's 11 was one racehorse, 22 was 1-2, 11-1-1-Race, 22-1-1-2.

That's very clever. Yeah, it's really cute when you see it on the page, And I've been told that this poem appears in something called the Ha Ha Ha Bunk Book,

which was published in 1982 by Janet and Alan Alberg.

A Bunk book, that's a great name too.

It reminds me of something that you learn when you first start statistics, that sometimes

numbers count and sometimes

they can be counted. Sometimes numbers count and sometimes they can be counted. Right. So sometimes they

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