100 English Lessons 💯 - British English Podcast

Hello and welcome to this very special episode of the

English Like a Native Podcast.

Why is it so special?

Well, because this is our 100th Episode.

And right from the very top, I just want to express my gratitude

to all of you, my listeners for enabling us to reach this milestone.

Wow!

100 episodes.

We've been through some weird and wonderful topics in our first 99

podcasts; from British bathing habits, to our Friday fish and chip

supper, our nervousness around nudity and driving over the speed limit.

We've had some amazing guests and we've explored loads and loads of vocabulary.

It has been a blast.

So, for our hundredth episode, I want to look at the number a

hundred itself, and some noteworthy appearances that it has made in the

culture of the English-speaking world.

Now, to be honest, it's a sensational number, isn't it?

Sometimes we talk about something being a perfect 10.

Well, a hundred is 10 times as good as a perfect ten!

It's actually ten tens!

It's an emoji, too.

In fact, I've already used that emoji today to express my total

support for an idea someone gave me.

It's a number that represents completeness and flawlessness.

If something is flawless, then it has no flaws, no errors.

No faults, no defect.

We demand 100% effort from our sports teams.

We want our energy to be 100% renewable; we agree, or disagree, with someone 100%.

By the way, "per cent" literally means “out of a hundred” and it's taken

from the Latin phrase per centum.

Although "cent" is not the English word for a hundred, it appears all over the

place: there are a hundred cents in a dollar and a hundred years in a century.

If we think about measurement, there are a hundred centimetres in

a metre, and water boils at exactly a hundred degrees centigrade.

Someone reaching a hundred years of age is called a centenarian.

And the hundredth anniversary of a state or organisation is known as a centenary.

And in the animal kingdom, the multi-legged arthropod, the centipede,

has, well, actually, no centipede has a hundred legs because they all

have an odd number of pairs, like 47, or 49, or 51, or 53, and so on.

So, not perfection this time, but you can see why someone would say that

these curious little carnivores have a hundred legs; I mean, who was going

to count them and say, well, this one is a 94-pede, or this one is 162-pede.

No, we call them centipedes for ease.

So, let's explore now an explosive example of the number a hundred; a

massive sporting event that can be over in less time than it's taken

me to introduce it in this sentence: the one hundred-metre sprint.

When a race is called a sprint, it means that the participants

are basically moving as fast as they can for as long as they can.

They're not typically saving a great deal of energy for later,

because there won't be a later!

It's all going to be over very quickly.

Now, if you were listening exceptionally carefully, you would have noticed

that I said, one-hundred metre sprint, when I talked about the

race, whereas before I was saying a hundred instead of one hundred.

The name of the number is a hundred, but we sometimes say one hundred

when we want to emphasise or clearly differentiate the number from any

other possible number of hundreds.

There are quite a few athletic races that are run over a different

number of hundreds of metres.

So you might have the two-hundred metre race, the four-hundred

metre race, and so on.

The men's one hundred metres was part of the first modern Olympic

Games, in Athens, Greece in 1896.

Women had to wait until 1928 for their race to be included.

There have been a few iconic one hundred-metre races at the Olympics.

One of enormous historical significance took place at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

when Jesse Owens, an African American athlete, broke the world record and won

the gold medal for what the Americans referred to as the 100-metre dash.

It was in fact just one of the four golds that he took home with him as

he defied Adolf Hitler's attempts to promote the fascist Nazi ideology.

If Owens was the hero of 1936, then in 1924 there were actually two heroes!

Have you ever seen the multi-Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire?

This 1981 British classic was based on the events of the 1924 Olympics

when Scotsman Eric Liddell refused to run in the one hundred metres, his

favoured distance, because qualifying races took place on a Sunday.

Liddell was a devout Christian, which means that he strictly followed his

religion and obeyed all its principles.

So, he would not run on the day of rest.

His English rival Harold Abrahams, who Liddell was strongly favoured to beat,

won the gold medal, but Eric Liddell didn't go home empty-handed; he qualified

for the 400-metres final on a Thursday, and won the gold medal on a Friday.

In more recent years, we saw the scandal of the then world-record breaking

Canadian athlete Ben Johnson, who was disqualified after testing positive

for banned substances in Seoul in 1988 after winning the 100-metres.

There has been tragedy too, in the form of the death at just 39 years of age

of Florence Griffith-Joyner who won gold at Seoul and in the same year set

a world record of 10.49 seconds, which still stands today, 35 years later.

The current men's world record is Usain Bolt's scarcely-believable

9.58 seconds, earning him the title of the fastest human ever.

After all that sprinting and dashing, it's time for something that took

a little longer than even my own attempts to run a hundred metres.

More than 100 years longer, in fact.

The Hundred Years’ War between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries

was a bit like our old friend the centipede in a way; the conflict actually

lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453.

This interminable war saw the appearance of the teenage French

heroine, Joan of Arc, whose miraculous intervention turned the tide of the

war back in favour of the French.

Joan or Jeanne, was born to humble parents, and yet she was able to

convince the dauphin, the heir apparent to the French crown, that she had

received visions from saints and angels.

These visions told her that she would be the one to fulfill the prophecy

that an armed virgin would come to rescue France from its enemies.

Joan dressed in men's clothes, which at the time was considered an act of

heresy, punishable by imprisonment or even execution, and fought at

the front of the revitalised army, achieving important victories to

pave the way for the coronation of the king, Charles VII of France.

Also known as the 'Maid of Orleans', the relief of the siege of this city

that she led was taken by many as a sign that she was indeed sent by God.

Unfortunately, Joan wouldn't live to see the end of the war as she was

captured, sold, tried and executed.

She is considered to be a martyr, not because she was executed for her

Christian beliefs, but in the broader sense of someone who willingly suffered

and died for a cause or principle.

Her name, story, and inspiration lives on in films, books,

and songs still to this day.

And speaking of inspiration, how about a bit of Shakespeare?

Have you ever heard the phrase “a band of brothers” before?

Until Joan of Arc put on her suit of armour and changed the

course of history, the English had been sitting pretty following a

spectacular victory in Agincourt.

The men are said to have been inspired by a rousing speech from King Henry V,

a speech which William Shakespeare put to paper in his play of the same name.

Although we can't be precisely sure what Henry said about courage and

unity to motivate his men to victory, one of the famous lines from the

speech in the play is; "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,".

This part in particular has been quoted and referenced in countless films and

books, as well as being used to boost morale in wars such as the American

Civil War and the Second World War.

A hundred metres, a hundred years, and now...

a hundred dollars.

The hundred-dollar bill is actually the largest denomination bill in

regular use in the United States.

Although larger denominations do exist, they were discounted in 1969

and so aren't exactly easy to come by!

The bill is referred to by some as a c-note, the ‘c’ representing ‘century’,

and by others as Benjamins, or Franklins, because on one side of the bill, you'll

see Benjamin Franklin, a member of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

This name was given to the group of revolutionaries, featuring four

future Presidents who played different roles in leading the American War

of Independence and establishing the United States of America.

Although Franklin never held the office of President of the United States,

he was elected as President of the State of Pennsylvania for three years.

He was a signatory of both the Declaration of Independence and the

Constitution of the United States.

He was also a scientist, and among his contributions to the advancement

of our society is the development of the lightning rod, the lightning

conductor in British English.

A lightning conductor is a mounted metal rod intended to protect

buildings from lightning strikes.

The idea is that the electrical charge of the lightning will be attracted to the rod

and then pass safely down an attached wire and into the ground, rather than strike

a building and cause damage or harm.

Also, in metaphorical terms, a "lightning rod" can represent an individual, an

idea, or a concept that attracts and absorbs a certain type of attention or

criticism, diverting it away from other potential, more vulnerable targets.

By the way, as part of his research, Franklin proposed to prove that lightning

was electricity by flying a kite in a storm and collecting electrical

charges from a lightning strike.

Do not try this at home!

Finally, now that this podcast has meant that we have joined the “hundred club”,

let's check out a different hundred club.

At number 100 Oxford Street in London's West End, there is a music venue that

organised a festival that must have been one of the most influential in history.

In September 1976, The Hundred Club hosted two nights of punk music featuring The

Sex Pistols, The Clash, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Damned and the Buzzcocks;

with Paul Weller, from The Jam, Chrissie Hynde, from The Pretenders, Shane McGowan,

from The Pogues, and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood in the audience.

This event saw a gathering of musicians and performers who have had

a major impact on guitar-based rock and post-rock as we know it today,

both alternative and mainstream.

Thank you so much for accompanying me as we followed the number 100 around history.

Of course, I'm already looking forward to the bi-centennial podcast, so I

hope that you'll still be with me to celebrate episode number 200 of the

English Like a Native Podcast series...

Thank you again.

Until next time, take very good care and goodbye.