Colloquialisms

Willsmotorcycle

Willsmotorcycle

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Makefield Highlands PA
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2016 ST1300P
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I start this for my strange questions to the Brits, do you call out your Honda as Thirteen Hundred or One Thousand Three Hundred? Some days my brain just goes off somewhere, could be the heat.

Feel free to add some others. Soda vs. Pop and the like.
 
It'd be thirteen hundred.
But if it was a car it could well be referred to as a 1.3 with or without litres added. Or indeed a 1300.
To complicate matters it would not be unusual for bike media to refer to bike tests as, 1 litre sportsbikes review, etc.
In the EU, God knows, they're a law to themselves. The French probably legislate that engine volume should be expressed as a number of croissants and the Italians in the amount of fusilli.
Just sayin.
 
What word do Brits and Europeans use for the number 1,000,000,000 (a.k.a. 1 x 10^9)? In the States that's a billion, but I think the Brits at least would call it a "thousand million", and a "billion" would be 1 x 10^12... right? In which case I'd offer to trade a billion dollars (or pounds) with a Brit, knowing that I'd make a 1,000x profit in the deal.
 
This Englishman would say one thousand million but yes, traditionally it would have been one million million.
That's inflation for ya.
I'd be happy for either in £ or $, but €......meh.
Upt.
 
ibike2havefun said:
What word do Brits and Europeans use for the number 1,000,000,000 (a.k.a. 1 x 10^9)? In the States that's a billion, but I think the Brits at least would call it a "thousand million", and a "billion" would be 1 x 10^12... right? In which case I'd offer to trade a billion dollars (or pounds) with a Brit, knowing that I'd make a 1,000x profit in the deal.
Click to expand...
Don't bet on it.
 
Oh you're just making fun of us now. It is not so funny. See below a picture of the rear of the exercise books that we had at school when I was a kid. We had to learn and be able to use this stuff, and would have to do long addition, multiplication and division with what was many different number bases. Tons, hundredweight, stones, pounds, ounces, pennyweights, grains. 7 different column headings. Hundreds Tens and Units were a doddle.
Although I suspect that we were given those while the thick kids *. were still struggling with 4+5.

* this post contains the correct measures of cognitive competence that were prevalent at the time,

Billion - used to mean a million million when I was a kid, but we adopted the 1000 million at some point, but it was a gradual thing. There wasn't a specific changeover date that I remember. There was a date when it became law that we use metric measurements.
The financial system changed from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal on 15 Feb 1971. A cunning way of hiding the massive inflation that was taking place at the time. Few batted an eyelid at things that cost a shilling were now 10p - a 240% price increase.

So I still know that 40 old pence is Three and fourpence , 40d =3s 4d or 3/4 and 70 inches is 5'10"
and 30 inches is 2 shillings and sixpence, or half a crown.

But enough of this drivel. I'm off to ride my bike - a Honda ST-9 gill.

1714718326816.jpeg
 
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