When I was in elementary, my teacher said that “Lutetia” was how the Romans called the city of Liege. As an avid reader of Asterix comics, I knew this isn’t true and corrected her and said it was the Roman name of Paris. She insisted that it is Liege. Anyway, the next day, she came back to class and said that she looked it up and that I was indeed correct and Lutetia referred to Paris and gave me a chocolate bar.

In elementary school our teacher asked us to spell the current year with roman numerals, so I worked out “MCMXCVIII”, which I was quite proud of. Instead the teacher came back at me quite snarky and said it’s much easier to do “IIMM”, just substract 2 from 2000, duh!

It was only years later when I accidently learned that he was indeed full of shit and I was right all along.

it’s much easier to just substract 2 from 2000, “IIMM” duh!

For anyone wondering why this is wrong, there are two reasons:

The roman numeral system only traditionally contains subtractions from the next higher five- and tenfold symbol. So you can subtract I from V and X, X from L and C, C from D and M

The subtractions only generally allowed one symbol to be subtracted, with a few notable exceptions like XIIX for 18 and XXIIX for 28