Noon and midnight are both 12 o’clock and the Twelve Days of Christmas is a popular Christmas carol.
There are twelve face cards in a standard 52-card deck and twelve is the largest number with one syllable.
There are twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, a troy pound is 12 ounces, there were 12 tribes of Israel and a popular movie was called, “Twelve Angry Men” (12 members of the jury). There are twelve function keys on your keyboard. F1 often shows a help screen and F5 reloads pages in your browser.
Many recipes measure items by the dozen, adding one more for a baker’s dozen. There are twelve months in a year.
It’s surprising how many times the number twelve shows up in our culture.
The letter X. It is the 24th letter of the alphabet, two Xs in Roman numerals equals twenty and triple x represents adult content, and adulthood is eighteen by law in most countries.
What plant becomes the name of a star by removing the first letter, becomes a number without the last letter and becomes a bird if the first and last letters are taken away?
Her birthday is December 31st. Today is January 1st so she was 7 two days ago, and turned 7 last year. Now she’s 8 and will turn 9 this year. And next year she’ll turn 10.
For example, if today is 01 Jan 2015:
30 Dec 2014 = age 7 (two days ago) 01 Jan 2015 = age 8 (today, she turned 8 on 31 Dec 2014, which was last year) 31 Dec 2015 = age 9 (her birthday this year) 31 Dec 2016 = age 10 (her birthday next year)
Jim and his wife Patty were sitting in bed together one evening while a thunderstorm raged outside. After a bolt of lightning followed by a loud clap of thunder, the lights went out. Jim stopped reading and went to sleep, but Patty continued reading in the dark. How did she do it?
Patty is blind and was reading a Braille book so she didn’t need the light to begin with. Of course this also meant she didn’t know Jim snuck downstairs to get some cookies, but we’ll just keep that quiet.
