Creeping Numeralism
It was called the zoning improvement plan, but went by its chipper acronym, Zip. And it wasn’t adapted quickly, wrote John Kelly in yesterday’s Washington Post. Zip codes met with “pockets of resistance,” he said, including from the White House, which omitted “20500” from its official stationery, even though President Lyndon Johnson had ordered federal agencies to start using the five-digit code a month or so earlier, in June 1965.
Americans may have been sick of numbers, Kelly said. Three years earlier they’d had to start including Social Security numbers on their tax returns. That same year, 1962, AT&T introduced “all-number” calling — which put an end to such notable exchanges as BUtterfield 8 and MUrray Hill 6.
In fact, Kelly reports, there was an “Anti-Digit Dialing League” created to fight “creeping numeralism.”
I wonder what the anti-numeralists would think of life in 2018. Today I created three new passwords, all letter-number-symbol combinations. In the course of doing that I was sent at least four different codes that would expire in minutes or hours. Numbers were texted to me, which I then used to create new letter-number codes.
As I wrote recently, the world has been heading toward numeralism for at least 400 years. Now we have Zip-plus-four. Put me in the words column, though. I’ll fight “creeping numeralism” wherever I find it.
(Mr. Zip courtesy Wikipedia)
