Hi
@Antares JS and everyone else,
I have come across interesting metric terminology pertaining to this issue.
My wife is involved with fiber arts. At a recent conference that she attended, a presenter from India referred to kilograms as
kay-gee. This impressed me most favorably. Metric advocates always point out that kilograms should be called just that —
kilograms — and not
kilos, a term widely used.
Kilos is not correct, because that term is a prefix and not a unit of measurement in itself. Nevertheless, even in countries where the metric system is universally used, people often use the word
kilo — no doubt because this two-syllable term is quicker to say than the four-syllable word
kilogram.
Actually, I find the designation
kay-gee to be revolutionary. Constituting only two syllables, it nonetheless references both the prefix kilo and the unit gram. Indeed, the very term
kay-gee transforms itself into the acronym meaning kg, which is the abbreviation for kilogram.
Then, at another conference related to fiber arts, a participant also from South Asia referred to millimetres as mm — so the term was pronounced as
em-em. At the same conference, another participant used the term cm to refer to centimetres.
Well, this is interesting. Perhaps then we have established quite succinct and totally unambiguous terminology to use for metric measurements. Adding to mm, cm, and kg, we could also use km for kilometres.
Hence, in response to
@Cape Byron's post #82, I suggest "Give the person a cm, and they take a km."
Stanley