The Hindu Business Line : Is it agonising enough waiting for ten K to arrive?

TEN thousand. A mark that the BSE Sensex came within striking distance on Wednesday. Financial kabbadi is on in Dalal Street, and the charts are suddenly more interesting to watch than the men in white shying at the crease.

`Sensex loses 8 pts @ 14:31 hrs,' reads a http://sify.com report `27 minutes ago', speaking about the index at 9,850s, `amid alternate bouts of buying and selling in frontline stocks'. Let's, therefore, get ready for the five-digit arrival by coming to terms with ten that will prefix the K (for kilo, meaning thousand), sooner than anticipated.

Ten is "equivalent to the product of five and two," says Concise Oxford English Dictionary, in an entry that appears after temptress and tempura.

"One more than nine," it adds, and you can continue, "two more than eight," and so on. "10 x 1; natural number greater than nine and less than eleven," elaborates www.mathnstuff.com.

Ten is base of the decimal number system, and `tens' is "the place to the left of the ones place, the second place to the left of the decimal." Any power of 10 which can be written as the product of two numbers not containing 0s must be of the form 2ⁿ.5ⁿ = 10ⁿ for an integer such that neither 2ⁿ nor 5ⁿ contains any zeros, educates http://mathworld.wolfram.com. "The largest known such number is 10³³ = 2³³.5³³ = 8589934592.116415321 826934814453125."

Ten is "the 10th in a set or series," defines Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For example, `wears a ten'. Etymology is traced as, "Middle English, from Old English tIene, from tIen, adjective, ten; akin to Old High German zehan ten, Latin decem, Greek deka."

Online Etymology Dictionary cites Sanskrit dasa, Avestan dasa, and Armenian tasn too. "Tenner `ten-pound note' is slang first recorded 1861; as `ten-dollar bill,' 1887 (ten-spot in this sense dates from 1848). The ten-foot pole that you wouldn't touch something with (1909) was originally a 40-foot pole," explains the dictionary.

Reignier says in King Henry VI, "If once it be neglected, ten to one we shall not find like opportunity." The phrase `ten to one' means "with overwhelming odds in favour of a particular thing happening or being true," explains Encarta. "She said it was an accident, but ten to one she's lying," reads an example.

Statements from our netas, though, may merit thousand in the place of ten. "The mind growing once corrupt, they turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly than ever they were fair," says the Bard rightly, in King Henry VIII. Jonathan Swift cautions that one enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

"Among nine bad if one be good, there's yet one good in ten," philosophises the clown in All's Well That Ends Well. `Nine times out of ten' means `almost always', as http://dictionary.cambridge.org educates. "See also ninety-nine times out of a hundred," it suggests. "Oh, had these children been at school, Or sliding on dry ground Ten thousand pounds to one penny They had not then been drowned," reads a tragic rhyme titled `Three Children On The Ice'.

"If you are talking nineteen/ten to the dozen, you are talking very quickly and without stopping," is a UK usage. Something `very common' is `ten/two a penny,' as in this example from Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms: `TV cookery shows seem to be ten a penny these days.' And `ten-four' is police code to say that a message has been received. `How many miles is it to Babylon? Threescore miles and ten,' is one of the many ways children are taught to crunch numbers about distances. "What need you five and twenty, ten, or five," is a line from King Lear.

`Ten-acre block' means, in New Zealand, "an area of farmland, usually near a city," and `ten-cent store' is the same as `five-and-dime' which, according to http://encarta.msn.com is "a variety store of a type, now obsolete, that sold housewares, toys, candy, small pets, and other assorted items at reasonable prices."

The phrase `Number Ten' refers to the official home of the British Prime Minister (PM) in Downing Street, London, or the people who work for or represent the PM, informs Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

Closer home, `10 Janpath,' as you know is a power centre; it's the residence of the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi.

In the Dictionary of Automotive Terms (www.100megsfree4.com), v-ten is "an engine with ten cylinders in two rows of five cylinders with a common crankshaft and shaped in the letter V."

Procon-ten is "a safety system developed by Audi which makes use of the relative displacement of the engine during a frontal collision."

One learns that steel cables pull the steering wheel away from the driver and increase the seat belt tension!

Ten-speed is about having `ten different gears controlling the speed'. And `hang ten', as http://encarta.msn.com explains, is "to ride a surfboard with your toes hanging over the front of the board."

TEN stands for many an expansion on www.acronymfinder.com. Tenor, tenuto, The Entertainment Network, Text Email Newsletter, and Teens Exercising Now, for instance. TEN is `ticket exchange notice' on www.hometravelagency.com.

On travel, again, Trans-Europ Night or TEN is "old name for international sleeping-car trains in Europe," states www.plexoft.com.

"It's hard to believe, but the `continent' of Europe is actually large enough that you could once catch some shut-eye going across it."

In Stedman's Medical Dictionary, the abbreviation means `toxic epidermal necrolysis'. Dorlands Medical Dictionary explains `ten(o)' as "combining form denoting relationship to a tendon."

Thus, tenodesis is the `suturing of the end of a tendon to a bone'; and tenolysis isn't the analysis of ten, but "the operation of freeing a tendon from adhesions".

Don't get tense, when finding that TENS means `transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation'.

There's a `ten-day-rule' that "for women of childbearing age that lower abdominal X-ray examination is allowed only during the ten days after the first day of the last menstrual period," informs Encarta. "This is to avoid radiation damage to an early embryo or fetus."

Wikipedia informs that `10' was a 1979 motion picture. Ten is also `any one of a number of rock albums'. Ten is "an Italian comics character featured in the Nick Carter strip", and `ten' is how the Japanese word for heaven is pronounced.

"The dove says coo, coo, what shall I do? I can scarce maintain two. Pooh, pooh! says the wren, I've got ten, And keep them all like gentlemen," reads a Mother Goose rhyme.

Then, there's the Derby ram `ten yards round'; shoe-buckling with `A good, fat hen'; lying in bed `till the clock struck ten'; numerical love ends with: `Nine, he comes; ten, he tarries; Eleven, he courts; twelve, he marries'; and `The Ten O'clock Scholar' suddenly comes at noon.

Ten laws on human obligations, which were outlined to Moses are the famed `Ten Commandments'. Of the Dasavatara, the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu, the last is to come at the end of the Kali Yuga, http://en.wikipedia.org. `Ten thousand talents' appears in New Testament, Matthew. Elsewhere, you'd read about the kingdom of heaven likened `unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom'. In King Henry VI, Cade declares, "Let ten thousand devils come against me, and give me but the ten meals I have lost, and I'll defy them all."

Critics point out that ten K is no indicator of growth. To them, this quote of Robert Louis Stevenson may lend support: "There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change."

George Bernard Shaw's view, however, is that science never solves a problem without creating ten more. And, to those who wonder what problems ten K can bring, Merle Shain assures, "One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment."

Is it agonising enough waiting for ten K to arrive?

ComingToTerms@TheHindu.co.in

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