As someone who is fine with letters but less than ecstatic about numbers, I was always on board with the replacement of numbers with letters in math class. I took to algebra pretty quickly and was thrilled about ninth-grade logic with its p's and q's, three dots and long, wordy proofs.
The opposite, though, did not please me as much, which was unfortunate since the Jewish Day School I attended K through 12 was pretty keen on the Talmudic and Kabbalistic numerical system that they called "gematria" and I called a huge stretch. Gematria, a form of Hebrew numerology, assigns numerical values to each Hebrew letter and is used to do all sorts of cool things like add up letter-values of words, find correlations between words with equal letter-values and, in some cases, even predict the future.
Thus, I found myself in gematria hell. The base-10 system was no longer good enough; we had to do everything in multiples of 18, the letter value for the Hebrew word "chai," meaning life. And every time I was assigned a Talmudic reading, I found myself doing math on the side.
Naturally, when I got to college, where gematria was a far and distant land, I was eager to shed my number-heavy past. But the numbers seemed to follow me everywhere. My engineer friends attend classes with numbers instead of titles, and parties are always at 12 or 45, street names not included.
It finally dawned on me that the numbers weren't going away when a friend of mine asked me to "86 that." To my surprise, it was not a class or a building number or even a Talmudic reference, and it wouldn't disappear post-graduation. So after nodding, smiling and failing to comply with her wishes, I decided to give up and hop on the bandwagon, starting with 86.
As it turns out, 86 was first used among soda jerks to indicate when a product had run out or been omitted from an order, as in "86 today's special" or "one steak, 86 the fries." It later evolved into code for refusing to serve drunken customers alcohol and for getting rid of customers (or just about anything) altogether. Unlike myself, soda jerks in the 1920's were fond of replacing common restaurant talk with numbers in order to communicate without having customers understand them. Ninety-nine meant "manager approaching;" 23 meant "out of my way;" and 87 and a half, my personal favorite, meant something like "stop what you're doing and check out the hottie out front."
(I wonder whether any of them went to Jewish Day School.)
As for the specific origin of 86, there is no clear consensus. The most accepted theory is that 86 was rhyming slang for "nix," meaning "nothing" (from the German "nichts"). The problem is that, while rhyming slang was purportedly all the rage in cockney and Australian English, the fad never quite made it to America.
The next most popular theories both have to do with individual New York hangout spots. The first, Chumley's, is a pub and former speakeasy whose back door — used to escape from police raids — was located at 86 Bedford Street. The second spot, 21, was a popular restaurant with 85 tables, meaning that on any given night, the 86th party to arrive would find themselves 86'd. The Chumley's tale is more widespread but is thought to be just as coincidental as 21's, and the speakeasy was actually founded in 1926, several years after the slang term first picked up.
Other suggested origins include a relation to the last stop on a Chicago train line or a Californian law, among others, but most of these are guesses at best, and, before I get caught up, 87 and a half.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu
