I thought this sounded familiar; here’s a thread from last month on the same subject.
In most cases, in the American language, the emphásis is on the first sylláble of the prefix: mílliliter, kílogram, héctare, but there are a few variants, most notably kilómeter and megafúckton. When it gets used a lot, kilometer is sometimes shortened to “klick”. Personally, I think it would be handy to revive the “league”, as 5Km. Then a great-circle of the earth would be ~4 kiloleagues.
Well, okay, but it occurred in the CRC Handbook in the 1970’s.
Skosh
RCH
BCH
Thanks, I forgot those…
The less precise version of that is the snatch whisker. I think the RCH and BCH get used in direct application, while the snatch whisker is more commonly used after the fact.
I make this same mistake a lot myself, but I’m referring to the “kil-OM-it-ers” vs “kilo-metres” where it is supposed to be the latter. Anything that uses “-OM-it-er” ought to refer to the gauge, not the measurement.
I don’t know why you think that. We still round things up and down when we use metric. It’s only when you see conversions in news articles that an unnecessary amount of precision is used (also done with currency and temperature). I roll my eyes whenever I see something like “700 miles away (1126.54km)” when clearly they can round that conversion down to a neat 1100km.