A trash can of metal shavings is mostly filled with air.
I was also confused but could be German usage where comma and dots are swapped. The German 208,198 is the same as the English 208.198
Conversely the English 1,000,000 is 1.000.000 in German! Very confusing.
Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
Well, yes. But it's mostly the Anglosphere being weird again: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.s...
I personally like to use thin spaces or apostrophes as a thousands separator, precisely to avoid the language confusion. I also try to avoid three decimals going for 2 or 4 instead, but you can't always do that, because it changes the content.
> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
As someone from another language that does that: agreed. It gets even weirder with 124: one hundred four and twenty. Middle-endianness is silly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
If you look at the image, Antarctica has “data unavailable” - seems we still don’t know what the penguins use! /s
Since we're talking about numbers, in France we used to count by blocks of 20, and the usage somewhat persists to this day: so, for instance, 72 is read "sixty twelve" (60+12), 81 is read "four twenty one" (4x20+1), and 96 is read "four twenty sixteen" (4x20+16). Mind bending for the poor French learners...
That's a weird remark to make. Lots of languages do that. And if you want to talk weird numbers, try Japanese with their 10k grouping (e.g. 100k is 10 10k, juu man, 1M is 100 100k, hyaku man, etc).
Regularly switching between four-and-twenty and twenty-four, I find it annoying and hence a slight frustration might have sipped through.
One third of the world seems to use ".", the other third "," and the others decides with own rules or have own symbols. (Space, "'" and "·" and "_" in many variants).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...