From long experience with teaching undergraduates, I infer that high-school English teachers are instructing their poetry students to count syllables. I don’t know when this started; perhaps with the ...

Anil Ananthaswamy suggests we are born with a sense of quantities – such as size and density – that correlate with the number of things (2 September, p 33). When I am counting $20 bills I say “da, da, ...