A good way of finding out if someone knows a single thing about linguistics is to find out if they think that prescriptivism is a legitimate way of looking at language. If they think it is, they do not know what they’re talking about. If they think it isn’t, they might know what they’re talking about.
This comes as a surprise to people who’ve spent most of their lives being told that they spell or speak ‘incorrectly’. The ‘rules of language’ we’re taught are in fact more like a dress code or table manners. If a man wears brown shoes with a black suit, many people will say he’s dressed wrong but of course this is mainly a matter of custom, like holding your fork in your left hand. As long as you don’t dress so badly that you die of hypothermia or eat your food so badly that you – I don’t know, injure yourself? – you might be doing things impolitely or improperly, but you’re not doing them wrong.
The same holds for language. There’s really one high-level ‘rule’ of grammar: if a native speaker of your dialect can understand you, you’re speaking correctly. All the other stuff about split infinitives, double negatives and avoiding cliches is a matter of style and custom. It’s important because we, as a culture, deem it important.
The rules that do exist are not a matter of how people should speak but a matter of how they do speak. Any competent English speaker can understand the phrase ‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’, so it’s not wrong in any meaningful sense. The judgement that it’s ‘wrong’ is customary or aesthetic; the judgement that it’s right is a matter of fact: you couldn’t ‘correct’ it if you didn’t understand it.
(I might, additionally, argue that the judgement that it’s aesthetically lacking is also wrong. Try ‘to go boldly where no one has gone before’. The rhythm is wrong!)
With that out of the way, we can now talk about London buses, which is far more fun. Because there are ‘rules’ of grammar when it comes to their names and it’s the fun kind of ‘rule’; one that’s observed and described, not one handed down from on high by Transport for London.
Whether you say ‘number’ depends on the number of numbers
First off, all bus names take the definite article: ‘the 22’, for example, not ‘a 22’. This is true even though there is more than one of every bus, so that, in accordance with the wisdom of the ancients, two can come along at once. We also only very rarely use the word ‘bus’ as part of the name. Strictly speaking, we’re referring to the route the vehicle takes, not the vehicle itself, but no one ever refers to the route explicitly. You’d never recommend someone take ‘bus route 94’, for example, only ever ‘the 94’. But there are many other rules. Excitingly.
Let’s say you’re in Canada Water and you’d like to escape. Who could blame you? The bus you take if you’re going roughly north is ‘the number 1’. It’s one of the oldest bus routes, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its name. You never call this bus ‘the one’: it has to be ‘the number one’. So, this is the first rule of London bus names: their number is preceded by the word ‘number’. Saying just ‘the one’ or ‘the nine’ sounds odd, somehow, so we ‘fix’ it – without knowing we’re doing it – by adding ‘number’ in front.
This is also true of two-digit bus numbers below twenty. So, ‘the number eleven’ (for whatever reason, there is no number ten). But, when the bus has a two-digit number above twenty, like the 25, saying ‘number’ seems to be optional: people use it more or less indifferently, not according to any pattern that I’ve been able to discern.
While we’re at Canada Water Bus Station, you might also get the 381. But three-digit bus numbers have a different set of rules. The 381 is never called the ‘three hundred and eighty-one’. It’s always the three-eight-one, and it’s always just the three-eight-one, without ‘number’. Perhaps this is because on some level we don’t think that ‘three-eight-one’ is a number, so it feels silly saying it. Or perhaps it’s just too many syllables.
If however, the bus was the 380, you would say ‘the three-eighty’. Again, this may be a sort of linguistic conservation, sparing us the enormous effort of saying the extra syllable in ‘three-eight-zero‘. So, there’s another rule: three digit bus numbers which end with ‘zero’ are read as two numbers. If there are two zeroes, as with the 100, you read the whole number (‘one hundred’, rather than ‘one-zero-zero’). It’s never just ‘a hundred’, likely because it feels mad to use two articles (‘the a hundred’). Rarely, the ‘hundred’ bus routes also get ‘number’ in front of them, but less frequently than the two digit bus routes. Like those routes, though, there isn’t a clear rule for when to say or not say ‘number’.
Then there are the night buses and various local buses which have a letter in front of the name, like the N1 (a night bus) or the W19 (a local bus in Wanstead). These obey the same rules about how to say the numbers but are never preceded by the word number, for the straightforward reason that they’re not numbers. Hence, ‘the en one’ and ‘the double-you nineteen’.
If you’ve ever wondered what to call the 171, now you know. What’s interesting about linguistics is how these rules form and change by absolute democratic consensus, even though they’re fairly complicated. It’s taken me around 500 words to explain something that millions of people do every day without the slightest discussion, debate or argument. We might still not have worked out the best way to settle all of our differences, but linguistics, even the mundane linguistics of bus names, shows how we can solve complex problems with simple rules and without the slightest dispute. And that’s beautiful.
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Frank Podmore 