Excuse never needed. Always worth posting
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The following exchange is apparently perfectly possible in Japanese, which I found very funny:
staff: “drinks for children under elementary school age are free”
wife: “oh good, so that’s three elementary school age kids”
me: “wait up, ‘under’ excludes elementary school age, all three are in elementary school, so no free drinks”
wife: “oh, yeah, sorry, my mistake”
staff (after a small delay): “I’m very sorry, I meant to say drinks for children of elementary school age or under are free”
Working on patent applications all day, as I do, I’m hyper-attuned to these differences: 未満 very explicitly excludes the stated upper boundary of the range, while 以下 very explicitly includes it, and I like that Japanese has these concise distinctions, while English is much messier and often lacks clarity. But in casual Japanese, it seems like people can nevertheless mix these up all the time.
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I think in English we have pretty concise and clear ways of specifying those concepts, too. The problem is hardly anyone uses them in everyday speech. 
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Maybe concision and clarity were the wrong focus.
Take 75 ≤ x < 100
In Japanese we have ｘは75以上、１００未満
In English we might say x is at least 75 and less than 100. That is pretty equivalent, but “at least” and “at most” sound awkward in some other contexts. Like for the restaurant example, children who are at most elementary school age would probably not be commonly used. So we use “or more” and “or less” or other variants that in turn can be clunky in a mathematical context. It’s fine, it all works, it can be clear enough and concise enough, it just lacks the one-size-fits-all appeal of the Japanese to me.
Or, I guess, that would be the case if people didn’t get the terms confused.
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I have picked up a bit on the one-size-fits-all aspect of some Japanese vocabulary, despite knowing none. So it seems like a valued trait. 
On the other hand, vernacular English’s tendency to duplicate, double up, and equivocate is also a valued trait (at least, valued by me). So it’s nifty we get to have all these different languages.
(I also enjoy that we have this thread to yak about our weird language experiences. We’re awesome.)
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In the matter of ages specifically, some people assume age at last birthday, others seem to care about school year and so on. When I was last involved with organising a convention which had child membership rates, rather than “under 12”, I put “born on or after [date twelve years before the convention]”. People were a bit nonplussed but agreed it was easier. (Simpler for me than for Benkyo’s original example because this was a one-off thing, not an ongoing one which would have to change dates all the time.)
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It is weird to me that here, kids’ ages are always talked about in terms of which year of school they are in.
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I meet that with Americans too, and increasingly in the UK now that that’s become somewhat standardised. Fine if you’re talking to other parents using the same school system who may know what you mean, but…
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I still have to translate Y7 into 2nd year secondary school (or whatever)!
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And to me as a non-parent the information I actually want is “um, about 12-ish”.
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Yeh, I was playing a game the other day and a character was referred to as a senior, so I had to go on Wikipedia and look up American education structure.
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Very often, with other people’s kids, the only thing you know about their age is the grade they’re in.
This creates something of a mess with youth sports, which is further complicated by different sports using different definitions of what 12U (or U12, for some sports) means. Soccer uses calendar years. Basketball is mostly by grade. Baseball is a mess, as different sanctioning bodies have different definitions. USSSA, for baseball, uses May 1st of the season, so 12U is ‘hasn’t turned 13 by may 1’ ( so for '26 12U is born on or before april 30 2013,) with some grade exceptions that usually push kids up a year. Little League uses August 1 (or maybe September, I can’t remember, and we don’t do LL). There’s another organization that uses almost the USSSA rules, but with different grade exceptions. And rec leagues do whatever the heck they want.
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I can see an argument for not having to move a player between leagues mid-season (and presumably the season starts don’t all line up). But of course that means you get the children born at the start of the eligibility period who are nearly a year older than the ones born at the end.
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Yes.
There was some sensational reporting a decade or two ago that hockey players born in January were much better represented in the NHL, and nonsense reasons about it. The actual explanation is that Canada’s youth hockey system used a calendar year, so players born in january were a year older than ones born in december, and all things being equal, older youth players are better (and then get more playing time, so they get even better, and the best of them (or richest) get more coaching, so …).
My daughter plays up a year in baseball because she was born in early May, and we started her playing the year she would have started if she was a week older. I expect this will be the last year she’s good enough to do that, because physical abilities are starting to become as important as skill. In one of the tournaments she played in last year, there was another girl in the same age group for the first time ever. the brackets didn’t work out that they played against each other, but she did talk to her. It was the third year that girl had played 11U, and she was now age appropriate. I saw part of one that girl’s games, and while she wasn’t the best player on the field, she was clearly the one with the best ‘baseball IQ’.
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@Benkyo is it true that Ben Dova is a funny name in Japanese?
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Uh, I think that would transliterate as べんどうば, which could have a few different kanji matches or near-matches, none of which seem particularly funny.
It would not be a name in Japanese, so it would be “funny” in that sense?
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No, not a Japanese name. It’s Japanese form of Ben Dover. A sort of name that kids in English secondary schools would use.
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See also: from the Netherlands = Dutch
(I know there’s a historical reason for that, but still)
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People from the Democratic Republic of Congo are Congolese
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