TO THE NTH DEGREE

Tell me an interesting fact about the number 20, class.

I’ve asked this question before. You can refer to 20 as a score. A nebuchadnezzar is a bottle of wine that holds the equivalent of 20 standard bottles. 20 is really old. The answer always depends on the age of the person answering. To a five year old 20 is such a big number, but to a pensioner it is but a cherry on the sundae of life.

20 is a fun number. But it’s a difficult number.

When I was at University, my favourite lecturer walked into the seminar room one morning, wrote a sentence on the board and sat down. “Tell me about this sentence” he implored us. It confused us for a long time. See if you can get it.

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications incomprehensibleness”.

I wondered if it was a ridiculously complex anagram, whether there were exactly three of each letter of the alphabet, whether it was palindromic. None of them were true. After a while he asked us to think of it as less of a sentence, and more a coming together of letters and words. Another few minutes later and we had it.

The sentence is special because the Nth word is N letters long. Each word has the amount of letters in it corresponding to it’s position. The first word has one letter, the seventh word has seven letters, the ninth word has nine letters, and so on. I was fascinated. How did this function? How did somebody come across this fun idea?

I was drawn back to this sentence this week, and as I thought about it it helped me understand the task that lies ahead. Think of each match as a sentence in this style. When you have two men fighting for the victory you can make a fundamental sentence: “I am.”

One on one matches are as easy as simply existing.

As you add more competitors it becomes trickier to navigate. A six way match becomes “I do see some small issues.”

When I think that 20 competitors will enter that ring? At first I felt scared. I wondered how I could possibly make it to the end, with my hand held high as the victor. But suddenly it came to me. Surviving is all about navigating, and if I can navigate a sentence as complex as the above in my late teens, then I can navigate this now I’m older.

There’s only one way to find out if I have what it takes to navigate the trials that lie in front of me.

“I am bid: only under shrill, ringing applause – quizzical inculcator jackhammers extemporised, collectivized, schizophrenics; extrajudicially counterbalancing anachronistically psychpathological transcendentalistic incomprehensibleness.”

That’s to say, class, that under the sound of applause, your amused teacher will beat-down the under-prepared collective performing madmen, taking it into his own hands to oppose those who (outside of any notion of time and space) have a manifestation of psychological, spiritual idiocy that nobody can even understand.

If I can navigate that sentence, I can navigate anything…