Dear Stan and Jim,
I agree with Jim on both of his points.
My usual practice is to give the spelled out unit name when it first
occurs with the unit symbol in parentheses as in 'We used 4 petajoules
(PJ) of energy' but I am aware that I don't always stick by this rule.
I will try to be more conscious of this in future. If I read this (say
on radio), I would read 'We used 4 petajoules of energy' and probably
would not read out the P and the J that was included in the brackets.
To add to the good points made by Stan and Jim, I would add that the
use of whole numbers makes the upgrade to the metric system simpler
for people whose numerical skills are not high. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/WholeNumberRule.pdf
where I wrote:
Australian, New Zealand, and South African builders have been enjoying
the simplicity of
using only millimetres on all buildings since 1974. There has been no
need to use fractions in
any buildings in these nations since then. Nor do they have any need
to consider slithering
decimal points since all of their measuring and calculating work is
done using whole
numbers. Nor do they have any use for mixed numbers such as 2 metres
34 centimetres and 5
millimetres as I saw on a building site in Italy (abbreviated to
2,34,5 with two decimal
markers!). Building managers in Australia reckon that they save about
10 % of turnover by
only using millimetres.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
P.S. I especially like Jim's 'my brain aitch zee' but I would
pronounce it as 'aitch zed'.
On 2009/05/11, at 12:07 PM, James R. Frysinger wrote:
Stan,
I strongly agree with using the symbolic form for units and prefixes
in writing, as opposed to the spelled out names.
However, I strongly disagree with pronouncing the names of the
letters in those symbols when speaking, as opposed to pronouncing
the names.
The practice of pronouncing the letters is what has led to inanities
such as "five em ells", which should be "five milliliters" (5 mL).
Do you give directions to people by telling them to "drive three kay
ems down the road, turn right, then it's only another two hundred
ems to the restaurant"?
"Abercrombie & Fitch" is pronounced as "Abercrombie and Fitch" by
most people, not as "Abercrombie ampersand Fitch".
I end here; my brain aitch zee.
Jim
Stan Jakuba wrote:
I appreciate the praise received for the suggested "metrication
strategy" that said:
Sell units, forget about selling metric. How to sell units? Use
them. When? Now. Where? Everywhere.
In addition, I should like to advise the following: When doing so,
use symbols. Do not write out, nor spell out, metric units and
prefixes. For example, kPa is pronounced k p a just like psi
is pronounced p s i. Do not say or write thirty kilopascals;
say thirty k p a , write 30 kPa. (No need to remind me of the
press editorial guidelines - everything can be changed, and they do
not apply to discussion groups.) The rationale for the brevity?
Endlessly I hear complains from most inch-pound people that metric
units are too long. Perhaps they are, in comparison to "rod" or
"are," but certainly not to "horsepower" or "british thermal unit."
But that's besides the point. Anti-metrics seem forgetting that in
I-P one adds the names of the powers of ten (10³) to the units. Few
realize that, for example, saying " k p a " is shorter than
saying "thousand p s i." Or that " k m " is pronounced quicker
than "thousand miles." SI symbols are brief and we Americans love
abbreviations and acronyms. That realization should ease the road
to metric. Pat, please write EJ, not exajoule. We will pronounce
it e j and soon others will learn that energy in e j means a
lot of it, like in oil reserves. As another example, inspired by my
earlier e-mail, the same with GW. Let's use only the symbol, not
the word gigawatt, and pronounce it g w .
While on the brevity, let me also re-introduce clarity to the
terminology in the energy-related discussions I just wrote about
elsewhere. I suggested to call the quantity "energy per time" the
"wattage." Energy/time is wattage - the "new" term for what used to
be called power. As said, I had seen it used sporadically in the
past.
Stan Jakuba
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
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