After many years of teaching Mathematics the author finally realized that an obnoxious student of his who claimed that 0 is not a number was actually right. None is the plain English meaning. Mathematics has been mentioned only once. It would be a relief to learn that the intention of the article was to sum up a part of the math folklore that has to do with math as a language. I read and reread the article several times.
Some juxtapositions are indeed funny, but on the whole the article s tone is quite apologetic.
Secondly, I wonder what the author may think of programming languages. This said, the whole argument of comparing contradictory meanings of math terms becomes vacuous. Some of the examples quite plainly have nothing to do with mathematics. Or, turning again to the number story, consider the plain English The crowd was small in number. Some terminological problems transcend barriers between sciences.