Dear Luke, on 2001/10/17 20.40, Luke Nicolaides at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> How many job adverts give the salary as £17k etc for £17,000? How many car > adverts describe the car as 1999 20k, meaning it is a 1999 modle with 20,000 > miles? What a lovely question. I have long thought that the use of SI prefixes would ease our muddled use of big numbers, and help gain support for SI from the general public. I would appreciate your comments on the thoughts below: Money and SI The bankers and other regular handlers of money are remarkably conservative. Recently (2001), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) changed from using 'pieces of eight' to using decimal currency, dollars and cents, in quoting stock prices. This change took the NYSE 208 years from the introduction of decimal currency in the USA in 1793. In 1792, it was common practice, in writing cheques and contracts, to place the pound sign (£) before the number from fear that a crook might add a digit or two at the left-hand end of the number. This led to our peculiar practice of writing one thing and saying another. We don't say $50 as 'dollars fifty'; we say 'fifty dollars.' Putting the dollar sign before the number is clearly inconsistent with how we say the amount. And, just as clearly, we have not yet recovered from the use of the pound sign (£) placed before the number in 1792. Even within Australia, we are not consistent. We put the dollar symbol first, as in $12.34, but when we are using cents, we put the number first, as in 34c. Some other nations do the same as us, and others are more rational. (For the moment I am ignoring the issue of writing $12.34 and saying 'twelve dollars thirty-four' with the $ sign on the left of the written number and the word 'dollar' placed in the middle of the spoken number!) Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA place their currency symbols before the number, and Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, and Sweden place their currency symbols after the number. I am not aware of any official policy with the introduction of the Euro; there seems to be no set way to place its symbol, €. I suppose people will stick with their current practices and write 1000 € in Finnish, French Belgian, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, and € 1000 in Brazilian, Danish, Dutch, English, Flemish Belgian, Italian, and Swiss. However, they will all continue to say the words with the Euro after the number. The Australian practice of placing the currency symbol before the number leads to some odd results when we choose to combine the dollar sign with other symbols. For example, at the greengrocers we see might see a sign that says $2 kg and we would read this as two dollars per kilogram. It would be more logical to write it as 2 $/kg, so that the reading and the saying could be the same. It also makes more sense to write two thousand dollars per annum as 2000 $/a rather than the clumsy looking, and difficult to read, $2000/a. It reads better and looks less cluttered if you keep the units symbols together. We also get extremely odd results when journalists have to write large numbers. Consider $1000m/a and $2000bi/y, which I think were supposed to mean 'one thousand million dollars per annum' and 'two thousand billion dollars per annum' respectively. With inflation, over many years, the large numbers needed for such things as market capitalisation of major companies or any number as part of a set of national accounts is now largely meaningless to all but a specialist few. We cannot come to terms with these numbers because inflation has gradually made our numerical language insufficient. For a time we tried words like billions, trillions, quadrillions, but because of their diverse histories and their undefined meaninglessness, we never comprehended or accepted them fully. Fortunately we have available a set of well-established words that can solve this linguistic problem for us. These words are the prefixes from the system of international units (SI). These are not only readily available but they have used successfully in many varied places. Australians have used the idea of kilodollars for years. This is not in the sense of 'My aunty died and left me three kilodollars', but in the form of 'Salary package – 100 k$', sometimes written without the $ symbol. In French economic circles, they use kF (kilofrancs) for thousands of Francs and MF (megafrancs) for millions of Francs. I suspect it is only a matter of time before these ideas extend to k$ (kilodollars), M$ (megadollars), G$ (gigadollars), T$ (teradollars) and P$ (petadollars). Cheers, Pat Naughtin CAMS - Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist - United States Metric Association ASM - Accredited Speaking Member - National Speakers Association of Australia Member, International Federation for Professional Speakers --