Text based art. Age is just a number.

A cliched aphorism

The expression “age is just a number“ is one that I find deeply irritating.

It’s the “just a number“ part that does it.

Nothing’s just a number.

It’s true that if you ask somebody their age they will reply along the lines of ‘35’ or ‘92’. Their answer will be just a number. But it’s not a number plucked out of thin air as in ‘Think of a number’. It’s a number that applies to something: it’s the quantifying of the precise number of years that the person has been alive.

When I’m in a generous mood I think of the use of the expression as a way that people think they are being kind to people by downplaying their age, but I’m not in a generous mood very often so I usually think that it’s just people being sloppy with their concepts.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, I quite like that sentence I used earlier “Nothing’s just a number“. It’s got several possible meanings: it can mean what it means in the context above or it can mean “Zero (I.e. nothing) is just a number”. And zero definitely isn’t ‘just’ a number – it’s a very interesting number.