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Wot The Common People Say

Decades ago, when there were still sixteen shillings to the yard, a friend kept saying that as soon as metrics arrived the English language would be much poorer.

Scientists, to whom in any case English was a second language, would be unaffected, but the common folk in their ordinary speech would be tongue-tied by the disappearance of ells, gills, leagues, scruples and cubits, and by the lack of synonyms and slang terms for their replacements.

I had my doubts, since I did not share her mistrust of metrics, decimal money, and the "Common Market" as the European Community was then known. But I had to agree that in the short-term we should have to put up with simple-minded conversions of Imperial units to ordinary units, at ludicrous levels of precision.

The pound, for example, would be preferable to the kilogram, because the conversion 0.4539 took so long to write. We were right, but the gibberish is dissipating now in motoring and cookery as journalists retire.

What intrigues me recently, is the appearance of new words, all of them identical slangy abbreviations of the SI prefixes, with different meanings in different registers of English.

Consider the word "mil", as used in the phrase 35-mil camera, written "mm"; 600 mil of milk, written "ml" and 300 mil of barbiturates, written "mg". Each use is clear and common, and has become the standard in other languages, too. To write or say the full expression "600 millilitres" is pedantic now. Journalists, mind you, referring to a bottle of milk, would once write "0.568 litres", getting it wrong in several ways.

The word "kay", always written as a suffix K and in upper case, is used in so many ways that its full expression may take a moment's thought. Consider its perfectly sensible use with salaries, speed and storage -- I travel at 100 K across a city 30 K wide, with 360 K discs in my bag. I weigh 65 K. I wish that I earned 65 K!

"Mega" is a living prefix, such as in the terms megabucks and megahorsepower, and "meg" has a life of its own in memory and resistors.

What are other readers saying? Is anybody anywhere using "exa-", "peta-", "atto-", "deca-" and "hecto-"?

Ken McAllister, Lyttleton

Ken McAllister, Lyttleton