on 4/24/2002 10:00 PM, kilopascal at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In reference to a book I mentioned in a previous message, John wrote on 2002-04-24: > What was the copyright date on the book? And what do they say is the > correct pronunciation of kilometre?
DARN! I just came home from the bookstore where I had browsed a bit more in that book, and gotten some additional facts. Now John comes along and asks some additional questions that I did not get the answer to. I guess I'll have to go back to the book store again tomorrow and look at it again. If I do this many more times they may insist that I buy the book. Here is the new information I did find: ================================ The title of the book is "The New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused and Mispronounced Words", edited by Laurence Urdang. It is a new book but I don't have the copyright date. I'll try to get it. I don't know what this book had to say about the pronunciation of kilometre. I will check. I did check a few other things today. The book does list many of the basic SI units (in addition to the prefixed ones I had been concentrating on) but it does not refer to them as SI units or even as metric. It just says "(this) is a unit of measurement of (that)". It does give the symbol for some of them but it does not seem to give all of them. The given symbols of the basic units have the same flaw as the symbols for the prefixed units (mentioned in my previous message); namely, that they may give the correct SI symbol but they frequently also give other variations (which are not correct SI). The commonest error is to list a second version where one or more of the letters is lower case where it should be capitalized (giving henries as both H and h, as well as giving millihenries as both mH and mh, for example). I looked up some of the micro words, which I am surprised that i did not notice the other day when I scanned the milli words (the micro words ended just one page before the milli words began). I was pleased to see that the symbols for all the SI units with the micro prefix did indeed use the correct symbol, the lower case Greek mu (�) as in microgram (�g) and micrometre (�m). The book gave a lot of words that began with the letters m-i-c-r-o- that had nothing to do with SI (microphone, microbiology, microelectronics, etc.). It also gave some pretty sad examples of the use of SI prefixes in very non-SI ways. Both the micrometre and the micron were listed as a units of measure. There was also the millimicron, an older metric unit name (not an SI name). Very surprisingly was the inclusion of the micromillimetre. Multiple prefixes are not good SI, but then again this book didn't pretend to be presenting only good SI. What I found surprising was the fact that they gave micromillimetre as well as millimicron which are the same thing. (Millimicron is short for millimicrometre.) I had seen the use of millimicron in the past, in my early days before SI was created (and double prefixes were discarded) but I had never heard of the use of the micromillimetre. There were a number of other examples of double prefixes that were not familiar and seemed inappropriate. As might be expected, they also gave non-SI units with the micro prefix (just as I had earlier reported the same thing with the milli prefix). There was the microinch and others. Of particular note was the microdyne, a metric but not SI unit. There was microbarns for area (specifically cross sectional area of nucleii), but I did not know that there were many nuclei that had cross sections so small that they would be measured in microbarns, but I don't really know much about that field. It is interesting to see these words using SI refixes in such a book. I will try to look again to see what else it has that might be of interest. Bear in mnd, however, that this is really just a comprehensive dictionary intended (presumably) to identify a wide variety of words actually in use, whether they are SI or not. Of course, it is a shame that they didn't identify which units were part of SI metric and which were just other, older metric or non-metric. Regards, Bill Hooper retired physics professor, Florida, USA -------------------------------------- "Simplification" begins with "SI" --------------------------------------
