This prompt is meant as a fun little prompt just because. As humans we tend to make mistakes. Some are big while others are small, but not everything that looks like a mistake is one.
The prompt is fairly short with only two speakers. There is no clear indicator of when this conversation might have taken place other than presumably after President Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address during the American Civil War. Are the characters in modern day? Was this the day after Lincoln’s speech? Maybe this is hundreds of years from now. We don’t know.
One thing that is likely about this characters is that at least one of them is American, probably both, though no guarantees there either. The use of the words “the president” might indicate that Abraham Lincoln is the sitting president of the United States of America or maybe it indicates that the speaker doesn’t actually know that his name is Abraham Lincoln.
The first speaker claims to not be quoting President Lincoln, but just because that’s their claim doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s entirely possible that they are embarrassed about being caught getting it wrong.
It’s also possible that they really aren’t quoting him. I’m not sure how much the word score is used these days, but I imagine it wasn’t entirely uncommon back then, probably a common word that has gone out of use like fortnight. Fortnight is still an uncommon word despite the game using that as a name, right? There are a lot of words out there that seem to have been in common use and now just aren’t. Someone from that time frame might have used those words and since I stopped it before saying two score and nine what, you can easily define that as whatever makes sense. Did people count sheep like that? Maybe they had fifty sheep and one was missing.
Have you ever heard anyone use score in this way in modern conversation that wasn’t talking about President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? I know that’s not the point of the prompt, but I am curious.
