Erm…not according to the original, see “stands for” and make note of the quotation marks used:
Maybe I’m nitpicking but if he intended the other way I’d have thought he would have said “PP means ‘padre (priest)’ in the plural”.
From googling the question, I’m not able to find any language other than Spanish that doubles letters in abbreviations to indicate the plural, and it’s not clear to me that this came from Latin. Perhaps Nava is generalizing from his Spanish example?
Oh, I wasn’t saying she was right–I haven’t the foggiest clue what the answer to the question is. I was just saying I thought you’d misread her.
Re-reading her post, are you taking issue with her saying “but meaning” in one example and “stands for” in the other?
I’ve seen “pp.” for “pages” in academic and citation contexts, but never “MM” to mean millions. For my own notes in court, I use “b” for billion, “m” for million, and “k” for thousand, as in “Plaintiff claims def. owes him $4b.”
I’ve only seen the MM usage in US documents, but we get quite a few of them here, so it’s not alone. I do wish people would use it consistently, though.
It’s especially jarring when it runs up against SI-style usages, as in Una Persson’s examples. But then we in Canada are used to dealing with such confusion (date formats, anyone?).
Because most people – even natural gas engineers – would rather risk a white-hot flash and tons of flying shrapnel from grossly miscalculated quantities of explosive gas, rather than force themselves to learn to be consistent.
Here on the Straight Dope, we prefer to employ Gaudere’s Law for a virtual version of much the same effect.