This is from the other list and I saved it but unfortunately I removed the original author of the email. All disclaimers in place here including, but not limited to: I did not write it, do not own it, but if you want to pay me a sizeable chunk of money for it I will sell it to you and move to another country. The email: I got an email recently asking if "jigawatt" was a real term, and what terms were used to describe large numbers of watts. Well, is "jigawatt" real? The answer is "yes" and "no"! At first I thought, like many fellow scientists, "Surely, Christopher Lloyd is just having fun with us! That's not how you pronounce gigawatt!" Shortly thereafter, I got a nice laminated sheet from IUPAC with units and prefixes on it. They took special care to point out that giga- (the correct spelling!) was pronounced with the first g as a hard g, and the second, as a soft one! According to my Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993) the first (preferred) pronunciation is " 'ji - ge " (as in jiggle) and the alternative pronunciation is " 'gi - ge " (as in giggle). Just to add fuel to the fire, fish have gills (as in giggle), but I drink beer by the gill (as in jiggle or jill). A gill is 4 fluid ounces, 118.3 ml in the US and 142.1 ml in the UK. (Thanks to Keith Oldham for pointing this out to me some years ago!) -----Original Message----- From: Farrar Hudkins [mailto:fhudkins@xxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 5:55 PM To: DMCForum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [DMCForum] Question for BTTF experts Sorry to bring in a shadow of a doubt, but in the movies I have, the word " jigawatt" is said, not "gigawatt." Since I've never heard of a jigawatt, I can assume they made up a fictional measurement of power. Kind of like the word "zillion". Should we assume they mispronounced "gigawatt" for three movies, or ...? *shrugs* Regards, Farrar -- www.wwno.org 504-280-7000 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Looking for a more powerful website? Try GeoCities for $8.95 per month. Register your domain name (http://your-name.com). More storage! No ads! http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info http://us.click.yahoo.com/aHOo4D/KJoEAA/MVfIAA/HliolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: DMCForum-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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