Comments on: Units that Measure Up: From Giga-watts to Hella-tons

By: Dennis Gorelik

Dennis Gorelik — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:03:08 +0000

It’s very easy to lose comment with your current wordpress settings:
if one field is missing (e.g. email) when commentator clicks “Submit Comment”, then the whole comment vanishes and even back button doesn’t help.

By: Dennis Gorelik

Dennis Gorelik — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:01:08 +0000

If mass of Earth is 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams and yotta = 10^24, then mass of earth is 5.98 yottagrams.
But I see where your mistake came from: mass of earth is ~5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, which is about 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons.
Which is about 5,980,000,000 teratons.
Which is about 6 billion teratons.
No need for “yotta” prefix.

By: MHM

MHM — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:07:55 +0000

Giga- is giant, right? What’s so German comedy about that?
Anywho, it seems that we’re now stuck on a pattern of naming the new prefixes by using numbers, slightly distorted, though. Yotta and yacto both come from octo, Greek for eight, which makes sense given that yotta is 1000 to the eighth. Similar things can be said about the last few prefixes. What makes sense would be something like nona- or nova-.

By: GAC

GAC — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:56:50 +0000

“This suggests that a hard German [?] was originally intended as the pronunciation.”

I don’t speak German, but I seem to remember that German “g” can only represent what English speakers call “hard g”, hence the original pronunciation is the one people use today, rather than “jiga-”, which is occasionally head from older people, but now considered wrong.

“In a sense, this all boils down to prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Measures used to all be descriptivist like the assload, but now we need prescriptive precision. “Hella” is a prescriptivist’s nightmare, but most modern linguists are descriptivists, so why not?”

Sorry to day this, but “hella-” will be a prescriptive standard just like the other measures. It’s one group of people telling the rest what they should say. Not that’s a bad thing, intelligent and thoughtful prescriptivism can be a good thing — read something from the 1400-1500s and you will appreciate standardized spelling even if English spelling isn’t terribly intuitive.

I wouldn’t call “assload” descriptivist. Perscriptivism and descriptivism are attitudes and methods applied to language, not properties of words themselves. I get the feeling that some linguists (note: I am not a linguist, I just have an amateur interest.) have a tendency to inadvertently promote that misunderstanding by railing against the most ridiculous or extreme prescriptivism out there, spending much less time on beneficial and informed perscriptivism