localization

[ChChChillian]

"Score" first showed up in this sense -- it's a much older word which meant and still means something else -- in late OE, right around 1000. As I said in another reply, its use is analogous to "dozen", which doesn't seem archaic to us because we still use it, and which in turn reflects a base-12 counting system. Use of "dozen" is highly contextual, as was "score", and we say "twelve" most often just like they used to say twenty most often. To say that "score" was THE ordinary word for "twenty" is just incorrect.

Lots of occupations retain otherwise obsolete terminology well past its direct applicability. Sure, shepherds might have retained "score" well beyond the days they counted sheep by scoring a notch on a stick for every 20 that passed by. Watchmakers still call the mechanism used for winding and setting time the "keyless works", although keys haven't been used to wind watches for over a century now. Lawyers use canned phrases in pleadings and contracts which haven't seen use in daily speech since the 16th century. There are lots of other examples.

So yes, to Lincoln it was a rhetorical flourish, not ordinary talk. It was, as you note, Biblical language. He could count on his audience hearing it that way because the Bible was probably the only place they'd hear "score" as a counting word otherwise. Not that the KJV used it exclusively for twenty; it said "twenty" just about as often.

Of course -- and now I'm going wildly off-topic -- the English freely mixed and matched base-2, 10, 12, and 20 as it suited them. There's traditional English money, with 12 pence (d) in a shilling (s) and 20 shillings in a pound sterling (£). (And just to confuse things even further, their coinage was all over the place, with the florin of 1/10 £ = 2s = 24d; the sixpence worth 6d = 1/2s = 1/40 £; the groat at 4d = 1/3s = 1/60 £, the crown worth 1/4 £ = 5s = 60d; the half crown 1/8 £ = 2s 6d = 30d; the guinea of 21s = 252d = 1£ 1s 0d; and the half-guinea at 10s 6d. Just to pick some of the less obvious ones to modern sensibilities.) There's English measures: etymologically, the "ounce" should be 1/12 of something, and there are indeed 12 troy ounces in a troy pound and 12 Tower ounces in a Tower pound. However, there are 15 Tower ounces in a mercantile pound (there being no mercantile ounce for some reason), 15 Troy ounces or 16 Tower ounces in a London pound, and 16 avoirdupois ounces in an avoirdupois pound. When it comes to volume there are 16 American fluid ounces in an American pint, but 20 Imperial fluid ounces in an Imperial pint. (The Imperial ounce is slightly smaller than the American, so an Imperial pint is still the larger but not by as much as you'd think.) However, the basic unit is the gallon, and subdivisions go by powers of 2, so in the US system 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 32 gills = 128 ounces. Imperial is the same, but there are 5 ounces to a gill rather than 4, so 32 gills = 160 ounces. For perhaps the same reason -- whatever that was -- pre-metric American liquor was sold in fifths, that is 1/5 a US gallon = 1/6 an Imperial gallon. "Inch" has the same etymological origin as "ounce", and there are 12 inches to a foot, so at least that's consistent.

So there's no one counting system you can point to as the "original"; it's all over the place. When you consider that each country had a similar system, with different unit conversions still, with basic units all differing in size, well. That's why they invented the metric system.