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The other day while visiting friends I was confronted by a rather advanced four and a half year old child, who asked me whether I would like to hear him count. I said I would. He proceeded to count from ten down to zero. I asked whether he could do the reverse. Start at zero and count up to ten. He said “No”, and added, “That’s not the way you count.”
I was going to say that it was the way I had learned to count but thought better and remained silent, suddenly realizing that there is more “counting down” today than there is “counting up”.
The earliest exposure to counting for the very young today, the exposure which they remember, is probably that preceding the launching of manned space vehicles, from 10 to “blast off”. It may not be long before children, starting their own races, will not say “One for the money”, “Two for the show”, “Three to get ready” and “Four to go”, but “four, three, two, one, blast off”. Or instead of counting up to 100 in “Hide and Go Seek”, (I assume that the game is still played), or, as a variation, to 500 by tens just to show off, the new procedure may well be a reverse count with a warning “58 seconds and counting” and a final warning of “Ready or not, you shall be caught”.
“Zero” has become the important number, or nonnumber. Budget makers now speak of “zero-based budgets”, implying that they will start every budget at zero and add on from that point, a procedure not likely to be very successful with the federal budget, anymore than a mountain climber who went back to ground level every evening and
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