Zero, nought, oh, nill.... whatever you call it, it is still a big fat ZERO!!!

So after reminescing with my dear American friend on our experiences in a particular stats class at a British University, I find it hilarious how naive we were to the various different versions to say "zero".  For several classes us North Americans (as there were several Canadians) along with other international students were highly confused not only because it was a statistics class but trying to figure out why the signifcance level of 0.05 had changed to "knot point knot five".   Seriously, the professor should have known it would be lost in translation and should have at least wrote it out.

May be I had not fully adjusted to the time difference and still had a serious case of jet lag, but I honestly thought it had been so long that I had been out of school that perhaps statistics had changed or I perhaps totally missed something the first time around that I took that class as an undergraduate.  Nope, come to find out the other international students were right with me in the confusion of calling "0" a "nought" (not the spelling of k-n-o-t like I wrote out in my notes) and wondered why it was the word zero was not used.  It was a silly and embarassing misunderstanding, as come to find out that there are several British terms for all sorts of things and zero is one of them.  So to clearify, "oh" - for telephone numbers (they like to say double "oh" for 00), "nought"  - for stats and other mathematics, "zero" - for temperatures, nill - for sports.  Oh, and don't forget that it is not naughty when they refer to the early 2000's as the "noughties".