The Last Word On Nothing

Around here, we do some things by the numbers. On odd days, the older boy sits on the prime outside seat of the kitchen island and has bedtime stories from his dad; on even days, his younger brother gets these things. On even days, no one has to wash his hair.

But then we run into a problem at the end of the month: sometimes there are two odd days in a row. I like this, because everyone’s hair is clean. The people whose hair gets washed, not so much.

I do have friendly feelings for those months where there are two odd days in a row. When it comes to dates, I really like odd numbers. In fact, most of my favorite numbers are odd: 3, 7, 17, 33.

I’ve always assumed this is because I’m odd, but it turns out that when it comes to numbers like 3 and 7, I’m far from the odd girl out. Writer Alex Bellos polled more than 30,000 people, and found that these two topped the survey-responders lists.

Some of the respondents gave the reasoning for their choices, which are often delightful. On the number 3: “It’s curly, but not pretentious curly like 8,” reported a 37-year-old man from the UK.

Yet in this survey, 7 was the hands-down winner. According to Bellos, the number’s attraction might stem from its unique arithmetic properties within the first 10 digits—it can’t be evenly divided or multiplied to make another one-through-ten number.

We make associations with numbers beyond favoritism, too. In a series of experiments, researchers found that some people think of 1 and other odd numbers as masculine, while 2 and even numbers tend to be feminine. Even though we don’t have the gendered nouns of other languages, we still use gender to understand abstract ideas.

Maybe we don’t even know what’s odd, anyway. A study last year found that people think some numbers are odder than others—many of the people studied thought that 798, for example, was an odd number. And they ranked something round and bubbly like 400 as “more even” than 798. If a number contained more odd digits, even though it was even, it took longer for people to classify, and they did so with less accuracy.

And while some people’s favorite numbers are odd, many also generally consider odd numbers “bad” and even numbers “good”, according to psychology researchers who looked at people’s feelings about the numbers 1 through 100. But magazines and other marketers seem to use odd numbers to attract readers’ attention—some say odd numbers even sound more believable. (For more on using the emotions behind numbers in advertising, as well as numbers in general, check out this RadioLab episode.)

Here, the two people surveyed report they like odd days better, even though it means hair washing. “I don’t know why, I just do,” says one respondent, 5. In the past 24 hours, he has also eaten soap on purpose so he could rinse his mouth with milk, made mustaches out of baby carrots, renamed his goldfish multiple times, and bitten his finger very hard while pretending to bite his finger.

In fact, I should start thinking of every day as my favorite day—because all the days around here, no matter the date, are definitely a bit odd.

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Images:

A 1712 Swedish almanac, Sendker, Wikimedia Commons

Carney Lansford bobblehead, Eric Molina, Flickr