Math for beginners

YOU don't have to be brilliant at math to be a business person or even an accountant, they say. ANYONE can do it. This claim is insightful, reassuring, and completely wrong.
People who say this have NO IDEA about the terror people feel when confronted by such a thing as A Number.
I bought ten things costing $2 each at a shop about three weeks ago. Ten times two? Whoah! This was way too complex a calculation for the shop assistant to do in her head.
Ignoring the $20 note I was thrusting at her, she used the cash register, punching in the number "two" ten times over.
She lost count halfway and had to start again. And even then she got it wrong. (Employers in the retail industry like to put people like this in charge of their money, for reasons of sentimentality, a Latin word meaning "insanity.")
Not that I am claiming to be a mathematical genius.
Last Tuesday, I was called to help my son with his homework. It was SO tough. I had to look up the terms in the dictionary.
"If all the angles are acute the triangle is said to be acutangular, or oxygonous," the book said. "A strophoid is an algebraic curve of the third degree."
But of course.
This left me thinking: What level of ability does the average person have? Do you, dear reader, know what your acutangular oxygonous strophoids are and play with them happily all day? Or are you more like my shop assistant, who has a single-figure IQ?
To do some research, and to fill up space in this column, I took my children's Junior Dictionary of Mathematical Terms (it was grade six, meant for 10-year-olds) to the place where I do most of my research: the bar. I read out the terms in the book and asked folk at the bar what they thought they meant.
Hypotenuse: A big, fat animal that lives in the rivers of Africa.
Equilateral: A line that runs around the middle of the world.
Octagon: Eight-legged creature of the sea.
Algebra: An Iraqi television network.
Obtuse angle: An angle which is slow-witted and unhelpful.
Acute triangle: Not suitable for publication in a family publication.
Prime Number: Valuable car license plate.
Pythagorean Theorem: A type of snake.
Radius: Ancient Roman transistor radio.
Additive inverse: Something food manufacturers slip into packaged foods because they are all trying to kill us.
Bisect: A man or woman who is attracted to both men and women.
Common Denominator: An Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Pi: Abbreviation for a pastry item containing meat, popular with Australians.
Polyhedron: A girls' name.
Trapezoid: A soulless circus performer.
Rational Number: A number that talks sense, as opposed to an irrational number, which is a number that talks like George W. Bush when he's ad-libbing.
Tessellation: A girls' name.
X and Y Axes: A store selling forestry implements.
I was interested to learn from one well-educated listener at the bar about the mathematical habits of the !kung bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Africa.
They have a delightfully simple system of mathematics. Their word for "ten" is "two-and-two-and-two-and-two-and-two." It's brilliantly logical, he said.
But my mind was on other things. Now I know where the staff at my local shop come from.
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