From Not Wikipedia, the free-ish encyclopedia

Canadian Numerals

Not to be confused with Roman numerals or with Canadian units of measurement.

Canadian Numerals are an informal sign-value notation used to keep the running score of a pickup (shinny) ice-hockey game with spare pucks.²⁵ A puck lying flat represents one goal; two, three and four goals are shown by stacking that many pucks. The fifth goal is shown by a single puck stood on its edge, with the flat stack cleared — after which the pattern repeats. The system is additive and is read like a tally, and it is named by analogy with Roman numerals.¹³

The notation is attributed to the Sunday pickup skates at Goggin Ice Center in Oxford, Ohio, and is dated by its practitioners to approximately 2024.⁶⁷

Notation

Symbols

Canadian Numerals use two symbols, both made from an ordinary hockey puck:

• a puck lying flat — value 1; and
• a puck stood on its edge (turned on its side) — value 5.

Flat pucks are stacked vertically. When a fifth flat puck would be added, the stack is instead cleared and replaced by one turned puck. Turned pucks are set side by side. A score is read by adding the symbols together, largest first, exactly as a tally is read.

Values 1 to 15

Higher scores

Beyond 15 the pattern simply continues: each further group of five goals adds another turned puck, with up to four flat pucks on top for the remainder. In practice a team's side of a game to any score of about 15 or fewer needs six pucks; a game to roughly 20 needs seven, and so on — one additional puck per five goals. Because ordinary pickup games rarely pass 15 or 20 goals a side, a bag of spare pucks is always sufficient.

Method of play

A spare (“free”) puck is placed flat where both benches can see it — at Goggin, on the ledge or ice between the two benches — on the side belonging to the team that scored. Each further goal updates that team's stack according to the notation above. Because the count is physically present on the boards, any player can read it or rebuild it after a stoppage; the score no longer depends on a particular person remembering it.⁸

Origin

Pickup hockey groups typically track the score by collective memory, an oral tradition that in some groups is said to run back decades. The Sunday skates at Goggin Ice Center had relied on a few regulars to hold the score in their heads. On a day when those regulars were absent, the players improvised a physical counter from spare pucks; the group then refined the method and kept it in use. Participants date this to approximately 2024, and from that point have referred to it as Canadian Numerals.

As with most folk practices, similar puck-counting methods may have been used independently elsewhere in the hockey-playing world; the claim recorded here is that this group devised and named its own version. This article is, in part, the documentary evidence of that.

Etymology

Canadian reflects ice hockey's strong association with Canada. Numerals is a direct borrowing from Roman numerals,¹ which likewise build numbers from a small set of symbols with a five-and-ten sub-base, read additively.

Relationship to other systems

• Tally marks — the closest relative: units grouped in fives, read by addition.³
• Roman numerals — also sign-value with a quinary sub-base, but Roman numerals are subtractive (IV = 4). Canadian Numerals are purely additive: four is four flat pucks.¹
• Unary — Canadian Numerals reduce to unary if the turned-puck symbol is not used.⁴

Formally, Canadian Numerals are a base-5 sign-value notation with symbols for 1 and 5.²

In popular culture

The system invites the usual hockey aphorisms. One common saying holds that “all roads in hockey lead to beer league” — the recreational adult game that most players end up in.⁹

“Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” — commonly attributed to Wayne Gretzky (and to his father, Walter Gretzky)¹⁰¹¹

Under Canadian Numerals the puck is precisely where the scorekeeping is. The self-deprecating line “I got traded for a bag of pucks” — a hockey cousin of the baseball player to be named later¹² — also reads differently once a bag of pucks is the medium of the official record.

See also

• Tally marks
• Roman numerals
• Sign-value notation
• Shinny · Beer league
• Fanbedextrous (Not Wikipedia)

References