fourscore...

[Mark A Mandel]

BTW, Safire got something wrong in his bit about "fourscore" this past
Sunday. I don't have it in front of me, but he commented, w.r.t. the
Psalmist's description of the human lifetime, that only in recent
centuries has life expectancy gotten up even to fifty or so.

Life expectancy is an actuarial concept, derived by statistical analysis
of how long a person born under given circumstances (e.g., in country X
in year Y) can expect to live, on the average. That changes drastically
with war, health, and so on. But the Psalmist was talking about life
SPAN: how long a person can HOPE to live, or the upper bound on a
lifetime. It's not statistically calculated, but based on observation
and experience: If a person isn't killed by violence or disease or
hardship, how old might he reasonably hope to get to be? "Threescore and
ten, or by reason of strength fourscore". That hasn't changed.

-- Mark A. Mandel