You’ll Enjoy this English Lesson - 100%

E100: Ever wondered why the number 100 holds such significance in our lives? Ever pondered its impact on the world of sports, history, culture, and even currency? Get ready to join us on a captivating journey around the fascinating world of the number 100! Why number 100, I hear you ask? Well, The English Like a Native Podcast is celebrating its 100th episode! 🎉 So, buckle up and ride with us in this very special episode. Trust us, this episode is 100% worth your time - we promise, you'll come out the other side with insights and trivia to impress at your next dinner party!

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hello and welcome to this very special episode of the English Like a Native podcast. Why is it so special? Well, because this is our 100th episode, and right from the very top, I just want to express my gratitude to all of you, my listeners, for enabling us to reach this milestone. Wow, 100 episodes. We've been through some weird and wonderful topics in our first 99 podcasts, from British bathing habits to our Friday fish and chip supper, our nervousness around nudity and driving over the speed limit. We've had some amazing guests and we've explored loads and loads of vocabulary. It has been a blast. So for our 100th episode, I want to look at the number 100 itself and some noteworthy appearances that it has made in the culture of the English speaking world. Now, to be honest, it's a sensational number, isn't it? Sometimes we talk about something being a perfect 10. Well, 100 is 10 times as good as a perfect 10. It's actually 10 10s. It's an emoji too. In fact, I've already used that emoji today to express my total support for an idea someone gave me. It's a number that represents completeness and flawlessness. If something is flawless, then it has no flaws, no errors, no faults, no defects. We demand 100% effort from our sports teams. We want our energy to be 100% renewable. We agree or disagree with someone? 100%, by the way, % literally means out of 100. And it's taken from the Latin phrase %. Although cent is not the English word for 100, it appears all over the place. There are 100 cents in a dollar and 100 years in a century. If we think about measurement, there are 100 centimeters in a meter and water boils at exactly 100 degrees centigrade. Someone reaching 100 years of age is called a centenarian and the 100th anniversary of a state or organization is known as a centenary. And in the animal kingdom, the multi-legged arthropod, the centipede, has well, actually, no, centipede has 100 legs because they all have an odd number of pairs, like 47 or 49 or 51 or 53 and so on. So not perfection this time, but you can see why someone would say that these curious little carnivores have 100 legs. I mean, who's going to count them and say, well, this one is a 94 peed or this one is 162 peed. No, we call them centipedes for ease. So let's explore now an explosive example of the number 100. A massive sporting event that can be over in less time than it's taken me to introduce it in this sentence the 100 meter sprint. When a race is called a sprint, it means that the participants are basically moving as fast as they can for as long as they can. They're not typically saving a great deal of energy for later, because there won't be a later. It's all going to be over very quickly Now. If you were listening exceptionally carefully, you would have noticed that I said 100 meter sprint when I talked about the race, whereas before I was saying 100 instead of 100. The name of the number is 100. But we sometimes say 100 when we want to emphasize or clearly differentiate the number from any other possible number of hundreds. There are quite a few athletic races that are run over a different number of hundreds of meters, so you might have the 200 meter race, the 400 meter race and so on. The men's 100 meters was part of the first modern Olympic games in Athens, greece, in 1896. Women had to wait until 1928 for their race to be included. There have been a few iconic 100 meter races at the Olympics. One of enormous historical significance took place at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, broke the world record and won the gold medal for what the Americans referred to as the 100 meter dash. It was in fact just one of the four golds that he took home with him as he defied Adolf Hitler's attempts to promote the fascist Nazi ideology. If Owens was the hero of 1936, then in 1924 there are actually two heroes. Have you seen the multi-academy award-winning film Chariots of Fire? This 1981 British classic was based on the events of the 1924 Olympics when Scotsman Eric Liddle refused to run in the 100 meters, his favored distance, because qualifying races took place on a Sunday. Liddle was a devout Christian, which means that he strictly followed his religion and obeyed all its principles, so he would not run on the day of rest. His English rival, harold Abrams, who Liddle was strongly favored to beat, won the gold medal. But Eric Liddle didn't go home empty-handed. He qualified for the 400 meters final on a Thursday and won the gold medal on a Friday. In more recent years we saw the scandal of the then world record-breaking Canadian athlete Ben Johnson, who was disqualified after testing positive for banned substances in Seoul in 1988 after winning the 100 meters. There has been tragedy too, in the form of the death, at just 39 years of age, of Florence Griffin Joyner, who won gold at Seoul and in the same year set a world record of 10.49 seconds, which still stands today, 35 years later. The current men's world record is Usain Bolt's scarcely believable 9.58 seconds, earning him the title of the fastest human ever. After all that sprinting and dashing, it's time for something that took a little longer than even my own attempts to run 100 meters more than a hundred years longer, in fact. The hundred years war between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries was a bit like our old friend the centipede in a way. The conflict actually lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. This interminable war saw the appearance of the teenage French heroine, joan of Arc, whose miraculous intervention turned the tide of the war back in favour of the French. Joan, or Jean, was born to humble parents, and yet she was able to convince the dauphin, the heir apparent to the French crown, that she had received visions from saints and angels. These visions told her that she would be the one to fulfill the prophecy that an armed virgin would come to rescue France from its enemies. Joan dressed in men's clothes which at the time was considered an act of heresy punishable by imprisonment or even execution, and fought at the front of the revitalized army, achieving important victories to pave the way for the coronation of the king Charles the 7th of France, also known as the maid of Orleans. The relief of the siege of this city that she led was taken by many as a sign that she was indeed sent by God. Unfortunately, joan wouldn't live to see the end of the war, as she was captured, sold, tried and executed. She is considered to be a martyr, not because she was executed for her Christian beliefs, but in the broader sense of someone who willingly suffered and died for a cause or principle. Her name, story and inspiration lives on in films, books and songs still to this day. And speaking of inspiration, how about a bit of Shakespeare? Have you ever heard the phrase a band of brothers? Before Until Joan of Arc put on her suit of armour and changed the course of history, the English had been sitting pretty following a spectacular victory in Agincourt. The men are said to have been inspired by a rousing speech from King Henry V, a speech which William Shakespeare put to paper in his play of the same name, although we can't be precisely sure what Henry said about courage and unity to motivate his men to victory. One of the famous lines from the speech in the play is we few, we happy few, we band of brothers. This part in particular has been quoted and referenced in countless films and books, as well as being used to boost morale in wars such as the American Civil War and the Second World War. A hundred metres, a hundred years and now a hundred dollars. The hundred dollar bill is actually the largest denomination bill in regular use in the United States. Although larger denominations do exist, they were discounted in 1969 and so aren't exactly easy to come by. The bill is referred to by some as a C-note, the C representing century, by others as Benjamin's or Franklin's, because on one side of the bill you'll see Benjamin Franklin, a member of the founding fathers of the United States. This name was given to the group of revolutionaries featuring four future presidents who played different roles in leading the American War of Independence and establishing the United States of America. Although Franklin never held the office of president of the United States, he was elected as president of the state of Pennsylvania for three years. He was a signatory of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. He was also a scientist, and among his contributions to the advancement of our society is the development of the lightning rod, the lightning conductor. In British English, a lightning conductor is a mounted metal rod intended to protect buildings from lightning strikes. The idea is that the electrical charge of the lightning will be attracted to the rod and then pass safely down an attached wire and into the ground, rather than strike a building and cause damage or harm. Also, in metaphorical terms, a lightning rod can represent an individual, an idea or a concept that attracts and absorbs a certain type of attention or criticism, diverting it away from other potential more vulnerable targets. By the way, as part of his research, franklin proposed to prove that lightning was electricity by flying a kite in a storm and collecting electrical charges from a lightning strike. Do not try this at home. Finally, now that this podcast has meant that we have joined the 100 Club, let's check out a different 100 Club. At number 100, oxford Street in London's West End, there is a music venue that organized a festival that must have been one of the most influential in history. In September 1976, the 100 Club hosted two nights of punk music featuring the sex pistols, the clash, susie and the Banshees, the Damned and the Buzzcocks, with Paul Weller from the jam, chrissy Hines from the pretenders, shane McGowan from the pokes and fashion designer Vivian Westwood in the audience. This event saw a gathering of musicians and performers who have had a major impact on guitar-based rock and post rock as we know it today, both alternative and mainstream. Thank you so much for accompanying me as we followed the number 100 around history. Of course, I'm already looking forward to the Bicentennial podcast, so I hope that you'll still be with me to celebrate episode number 200 of the English Likernated Podcast series. Thank you again, until next time, take very good care and goodbye.