Dozenal

Well, here's news. Turns out that the "Duodecimal Society" is now "The Dozenal Society." Apparently all this happened some time ago, although I was not consulted or informed. I learn all this from Michael Qunion at World Wide Words. who seems to be amused by the word. I fancy the concept itself: replace base-10 counting with base-12.

We could certainly do it: clocks already work on base-12. And it would be a whole lot more convenient: 12 is divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while poor 10 gets only 2 and 5. I suppose it was what I had in mind a while back when I tried to lop a dozen years off my age. I just didn't know they had a society before, much less a renaming.

There is an American branch, but I gather the mother church here is British, and it all does seem very British, not so? Recall it was Plantagenet Palliser in the Trollope novels dedicated his political career to the establishment of the decimal currency. Had he lived to climb that mountain, one has to suppose he would have moved on.

Anyway, here's to you, duodecimalists dozenists. I in-dozen-d to pay you more at-dozen-tion in the future.