From: Robert Munafo <mrob27@gmail.com>

Writing out large numbers in words:

  http://www.grammarbook.com/numbers/numbers.asp

Any set of rules that contains the phrase "7 math students" clearly does not apply to the language I know as English.

See examples in Rule 7, and note that the comma is used in words whenever it is used in digits (but not in 4-digit numbers). But in any case there is no "and", and the comma when present replaces the missing "and".

Yeah, that's definitely not English as I know it.

Numbers written digitally have a comma "27,101", so the use of the comma in words is closer to the way it is written in digits.

"One thousand and one nights" is a contraction of the original title (in English) "The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night"

The person using the contracted form was an English speaker who translated poorly and simply used the English rules for spelling 1001. (In the same way that the Frenchman before him translated it into "Les mille et une nuits", and seemingly at least some of the Arabic translations before that.) American rules would not have applied to such a work. That later translations used a more faithful translation is irrelevant, "one thousand and one" means 1001 in English, nothing more.

which implies that the 1000 nights are to be considered separate from the one night. In the story, 1000 nights are spend telling tales with cliffhanger endings and Scheherazade anticipating her execution, and then the final night, in which she has been pardoned (and will become the queen). It is as if "1000 vases and one jug" were poorly translated into "1000 and one bottles" which was then interpreted by the reader as "1001".

Apart from the fact that it's "nights" and "night" becoming "nights", rather than "vases" and "jug" becoming "bottle". There was no emphasis at all in the "and one". That was just the French and the English way of spelling the number 1001. If it sounds odd to American ears, that's because you have a different set of rules for spelling numbers, but they are irrelevant to books written in English by Englishmen for an English-speaking audience. Phil