A few months ago, I started re-watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but in order to prevent my feeling like I was just wasting my time re-watching a television show, I decided to watch the whole series with French audio (and English subtitles) with the hope of improving my French (un nouvel espoir, if you will). Recently, I watched an episode in which a character said "One hundred percent." In French, this is "cent pour cent," which got me thinking.
As a phrase, "cent pour cent" epitomizes the perfect completeness of 100% because cent (from the Latin centum) appears twice. It's literally "one hundred for one hundred." In English, however, cent is paired with hundred, which is from Old English. It's still 100 for 100, but there's this melange of etymologies.
