I think it's fair to say UK has adopted thousand million, even the government use it in the fiscal reports/statements.
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Exactly. It must be decades since I last saw/heard anyone in UK to use 'billion' to refer to 'a million million'
It's one of those things I check if it makes a difference, such as water dosing etc.
Nothing wrong in wanting to be certain.
If I understand (maybe not!) what you mean by 'water dosing', one usually sees 'parts per million' (not even 'parts per {US} billion', let alone 'parts per {UK theoretical} billion'!
Indeed, 'a million million' is such a large number that it would never be needed for many 'everyday' purposes in the UK (or many/most other places) - even national finances don't run into that number of pounds - it's only in disciplines like astronomy, some physics and some microbiology that such large numbers would normally be seen.
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One of my 'control panel' jobs involved programming the touch screen display for a water treatment system, one of the items in the system was detecting the contents of the water prior to auto dosing, some of those contents were measured in thousand, million or billion and they all had to be scaled to million for the display although kept in their original format for the dosing calculations.
Yes I do realise that, But it does help my explanation of the way they tend to change things to suit themselves and then a lot of the world follows them.
By biggest problem is the way they pronounce the word "data" rather than the proper way , a few more words too, and spellings too "color" for example. They way they muck about with dates and times is another example.
Mind you, when I was a lad a local hardware shop (Ironmongers) as well as selling what you`d expect as hardware/ironmongery also sold maggots for fishing but more surprisingly cockles, in shells, by the "quart" jug.
Cockles sold in a liquid volume vessel was the one that got me most, rather than by weight.
Mind you I`ve never actually seen fish in kettles as far as I know.
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As a point of fact, the Chancellor Dennic Healey took it upon himself to redefine the billion for all government purposes, during a budget speech in 1975.
I believe, that was following on from a PM question to Harold Wilson in 1974...
Well Dennis was a "Silly Billy" then
That's true in a good few cases, but I'm imagine that a lot of people (not only 'them') would say that many of the changes were 'improvements'(making the language more logical/consistent, with less 'anomalies'). Maybe the most surprising thing is that they have stuck with something very close to English - many countries have evolved languages which are 'based on' those of other countries, but those languages are usually much more different from 'their origins' than the difference between what the Americans ans us speak.
In present context, I think we can probably agree that, other than in a small number of specialised disciplines, what was needed was a word for 10^9, not 10^12. Although "we" do have a word for that in 'proper English' ("milliard") I don't recall having ever heard anyone using it. If we had been using "milliard" for 10^6 (and "billion" for 10^12), then the Americans probably wouldn't have seen a reason to change anything They wanted/needed a word for 10^9, but I agree it's rather confusing that they chose to use "billion" (which was already 'spoken for in proper English').
I think you're probably on fairly thin ice there, given that English spelling and pronunciation can be so bizarre and inconsistent, often fairly illogical and often very far from 'phonetic'.
Someone may have decreed that we pronounce "data" as we do, but why? They didn't issue a similar decree in relation to "rata" (as in 'pro rata')
In terms of how it is usually pronounced (in both countries), neither of the spellings of colour/color are phonetically logical.
In mathematical terms, hence for ease of use by computers etc., the US MMDDYYYY is certainly 'the worst' format, and our DDMMYYYY not all that much better - by far the most maths/computer-friendly version is YYYYMMDD. Having said that, when speaking I think it's probably at least as common for 'us' to say "September 11th" as "11th September", isn't it?
It's not that unusual for things that could be sold by weight to be sold by volume if that is more convenient and/or more practical - and in some cases can be 'more appropriate' In the case you mention, maybe many of the people who originally sold cockles etc. (fishermen?) did not have weighing equipment, but did have pint/quart jugs/mugs - hence the 'tradition' was established ?
As for 'more appropriate', if one wants to cover a garden of known area with a layer of topsoil of known thickness, it's more convenient to buy that topsoil by the cubic metre than by the tonne. Similarly if one wants to fill spaces/void with insulation etc. etc.
Heinz Tomato Ketchup (and probably other things) are potentially confusing, since they are labelled by both volume and weight. The potential confusion results from the fact that, given the density, the figures in cc and Ml are similar, but different!
You probably have, because the correct term for the vessels you're referring to (in which fish can be cooked) is a "fish kettle'. There are obviously countless examples of words which have different meanings when used with different 'qualifiers and, indeed, many in which a word has multiple different meanings (in different contexts) without any qualifiers (e.g. "an iron", "a socket" etc.
Kind Regards, John
In my world the terms pro rata and pro data are identical, makes sense
data as in tomato (UK version not USA)
fewer anomalies
I don't think I've ever come across ";pro data".
I may be misunderstanding here ...
... when you pronounce "data", does it rhyme with "martyr" or with "later" ?
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