Oh, Fact of The Day (FOTD), what have you done NOW?

Take a look at one of the most recent “factual” tidbits I received:

A tanka is a Japanese verse form of 31 syllables in 5 unrhymed lines, the first and third having 7 syllables each, and the others 7.

Hmmm. I haven’t had cause to do all that much arithmetic in recent years, but something strikes me as ODD about the above-mentioned FOTD. Perhaps it is because I recently found out that I could, indeed, still pass eighth grade math that I find the previous calculation suspect.

You Passed 8th Grade Math
I AM SO PROUD.

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

And yes, secretly I took the test several times over until I could figure out which question I was getting wrong, so now I have a score of 10/10.

With my freshly-reinforced mathematics acumen I have deduced the following:
Now I am a scientist, a philosopher, AND a mathematician.

Doesn’t “add” up, does it. And if you, as I, were dying of curiosity to see which lines in the “tanka” form had a different number of syllables (ideally FEWER than seven), look here.