When this century began we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely.
But now I reach for my throwing-slippers when someone on the radio says: ‘One hundred per cent.’ It can be a hundred per cent, hundred per cent or (in the mouth of Gen Z) hundo P.
Even odder is the development of an emoji with its own meanings. I had supposed that 💯 meant 100 per cent, implying agreement. But the immediate figurative reference is to examination marks (which to be sure are 100 per cent when the mark is 100). So the emoji primarily implies full marks for the interlocutor, not absolute agreement by the writer.
This emoji is labelled U+1F4AF by Unicode, the system that enables characters and scripts (168 of them, from Old Uyghur to Samaritan) to be used online. Unicode is also to blame for the lamentable use of emoticons online as a substitute for words. Unicode encodes 3,790 emojis, some I admit quite useful, such as the waning gibbous moon symbol.
Arabic numerals such as 100 are already translingual. There is no need to vocalise them in any particular language: you don’t have to say to yourself ‘hundred’ or ‘cien’ when reading one. But the ‘hundred points symbol’ has two main figurative meanings: either ‘Full marks’ or ‘Keep it real’. If someone had said ‘Keep it real’ to me, I’d have thought it a criticism, like ‘Don’t be daft’. But it is regarded as friendly support, in the sense of ‘Keep authentic and truthful’.
In India, more charmingly because less familiarly, they still use cent per cent, an old-fashioned way of saying completely. The Indians speak of ‘a cent per cent success’, but if I said that in Britain it would increase the percentage of blank stares I receive.
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