During the recent snowstorm in the Northeast, television journalists ominously reported that some 10,000 airline flights were canceled.
In the immediate hours after two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, reports of the death toll claimed as many as 10,000 killed.
Several years later, the mayor of New Orleans gave the national media the same figure in his early estimate of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Beware the lure of the 10,000.
Whether a huge terror strike against nation’s security or a natural disaster, authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere are likely to provide the most convenient and usually the largest number that journalists are willing to accept, or at least unlikely to challenge.
And that is what makes 10,000 not a fact but just a symbol representing a large and uncertain number. It is misleading for journalists to use and almost always unjustified.
A word largely out of fashion—myriad—means exactly the same thing and comes from the Greek number 10,000. Other languages, from Chinese to Hebrew, also have a specific word that basically means a big honkin’ number.
In tragedy, it’s meant to magnify the disaster. In the aftermath of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatilla neighborhoods in southern Beirut, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official claimed that 10,000 residents had been killed.
I replied that that was nonsense because nowhere near 10,000 people lived in the concrete block homes of those established refugee camps and that many had already fled when the Christian Lebanese militia came to kill.
The actual number killed in those Beirut camps is still hotly disputed, ranging from a low estimate of in the 400s to more than 2,000.
A more certain number came a year after the 9/11 attack when the Center for Disease Control reported there were 2,726 death certificates filed.
Katrina killed an estimated 1,400 in the city, although there is still controversy about how authorities counted the locations and cause of the deaths.
These events are no less tragic with lower numbers, but the credibility of journalism is at stake among readers and viewers when reporters accept a bogus round number as fact.
In the Northeast Christmas storm in 2010, the number 10,000 was used both for flights canceled and airline employees laid off in recent years. Both signify a lot. That why “myriad” comes in handy though it seems a bit archaic and most would not recognize it.
Still, the sense of a large number has uses in more benign areas of life and counting. Has anyone challenged whether Minnesota really is the land of 10,000 lakes?
Also the number is present in worship, as the lyrics of the classic hymn “Amazing Grace” tells us:
When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.
It may have been as popular a measurement in the 18th Century as it is now because another hymn, Come You Sinners Poor and Needy, from that period makes this claim:
I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior;
O there are ten thousand charms.
I suspect it has never gone out of fashion.
The number is used in modern science to signify a large, unknown number of neurons in the brain; in history the army of 10,000 referred to troops both in ancient Greece and in the American Civil War; and there are scores of references in art, literature and music (the rock group 10,000 Maniacs), also in films and games. The long distance race in track is 10,000 meters.
It’s a great number, with dozens of biblical references including one that counts the number of angels as “ten thousand times ten thousand.” We often think of charting that same number in geologic time and, in San Francisco, there is a prototype of a clock that is designed to be accurate for the next 10,000 years.
Up until 1969, the U.S. Treasury printed the highest denomination, a $10,000 bill, with the portrait of Salmon P. Chase. (For a very brief time in the mid-1930s, there was bill 10 times that — a $100,000 bill graced by Woodrow Wilson.)
No question the number is fine, enormous and seemingly complete, but we ought to pause every time someone uses the number 10,000 as a legitimate amount, and ask them how they came to that account, or just say, “Do you really mean that?”
