Howard Stern is a wealthy man, but he sought to be some $300 million richer after his radio employer, Sirius, doubled his audience by acquiring rival XM. Stern thought his contract said as much but a court disagreed. Businesspeople and lawyers alike can take a lesson from the deal, presented here in one of my three-part series this week on the unruliness of words–and numbers. Following on my accounts of whether the attack 14 years ago today on the WTC was one occurrence or two and whether The Hobbit film trilogy released by New Line Cinema was one film or three, here's the Stern story.The Howard Stern Show is a popular off-color program long aired on traditional radio. But in 2004, one of the leading satellite radio companies, Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., persuaded Stern to move his program to its service. Performance compensation under the resulting licensing agreement called for Sirius to pay Stern's production company up to five separate awards of common stock in Sirius—each worth $75 million—if a series of ever-rising subscriber thresholds was met.To implement this deal, the parties included in their formal written contract an exhibit setting out the company's estimated number of subscribers as of year-end for each of the ensuing five years. The agreement then provided that the company would pay a stock bonus if at any year-end the actual number of subscribers exceeded the target by a specified amount: a first bonus for exceeding the target by two million; a second for exceeding it by four million; a third for exceeding by six million; a fourth for exceeding by eight million; and a fifth by ten million.