A Note on Grand and its Silent Entourage

1. Colloquial American English allows dollars not to be pronounced in sentences like: (1) How can they be asking a hundred and fifty thousand for a house with no roof? (2) It’ll cost you a hundred just to get into the game. In an even more colloquial or slang register, (1) can be expressed as: (3) How can they be asking a hundred and fifty grand for a house with no roof? with grand apparently replacing thousand. The interpretation of a hundred and fifty grand here is necessarily that of a hundred and fifty thousand. Example (3) could not be interpreted as a hundred and fifty million/billion, etc. Similarly, hundred cannot be replaced by grand in (2) without changing the interpretation. The following is possible, but only with the interpretation of a thousand: (4) It’ll cost you a grand just to get into the game. One might be tempted to propose that a certain very colloquial American English contains an element grand with the same syntax and interpretation as thousand. Such a proposal would run into a series of difficulties. An initial relatively minor one is that grand can ‘replace’ thousand only in monetary contexts. Just as one can omit dollars in (1) and (2), one can omit years (old) in:1 (5) They think they’re gonna live to be a thousand. But in age contexts, grand is not at all possible: (6) *They think they’re gonna live to be a grand. Similarly: (7) Even at the age of a thousand/*grand, you’d be sharp as a whistle. again with silent years. A more major difficulty for such a proposal would come from the fact that pronouncing dollars in the context of grand is impossible: (8) *How can they be asking a hundred and fifty grand dollars for a house with no roof? (9) *It’ll cost you a grand dollars just to get into the game. These are of course both possible with thousand back in place of grand: (10) How can they be asking a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a house with no roof? (11) It’ll cost you a thousand dollars just to get into the game. If grand were simply a very colloquial stand-in for thousand, why would (8) and (9) not be allowed? Additional difficulties for the idea that grand is merely a very colloquial version of thousand are as follows. First, thousand can appear in approximative expressions as in:2 (12) They’ve spent (tens of) thousands on their new house just this year alone. Grand is not possible here:3 ------------------------------------