Billions

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>]

lojbab to Dave:
>
> 3. With all due respect to the British, the megdo and gigdo gismu and their
> relatives are based on the metric prefixes, and I hope that a British
> Lojbanist will use ci gigdo rather than ciki'o megdo.

We make more use of the metric system here than in the US, I think, so
insofar as anybody uses Giga- and Mega-, they are familiar here. (I
happen to think that anything outside Mego- to micro- is a worthless
accretion to the metric system, but that is another matter). The only
(possible) problem is in the translation - if you gloss "gigdo" as
"billion" rather than "Giga-": but actually, thanks to American cultural
imperialism ;-) and the fact that billion = 1E9 is more useful in the
modern world, that ambiguity now exists in everyday British life, with
most people (including the influential newspapers) following what was
formerly American usage, and those who cannot bring themselves to use
the term in that way avoiding it altogether.

[On the subject, I have only ever come across phrases like "quintillion"
in American popular science books - I believe they are vacuous, as the
only thing directly conveyed to me by the choice between "quintillion"
and "quadrillion", say, is that the one is bigger than the other - since
both are in the realm that I cannot comfortably hold in my mind, the
distinction is nugatory. End of rant]

        kolin
                c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk