Spoilers for Monday 3rd August 2026 (Series 94, Heat 26)

[Stewart Gordon]

"We took it from the French and kept it."
I guess I should love the way Susie has implicitly acknowledged the nonsensicality of the term "borrow" as we never seem to give "borrowed" words back.

One of my primary school teachers would sometimes write a long subtraction sum on the blackboard and have members of the class take us through the calculation a digit at a time. She would fail anyone who says "borrow" for the same reason.

But I wonder how common it is for people to be taught the method whereby, rather than subtracting 1 from the digit of the minuend, one adds 1 to the digit of the subtrahend, sometimes referred to as paying it back. But this is a bit different in that the value is copied back and forth, and in the second instance it's a negative copy. If that makes sense.