"jigga-" v. "gigga-"
Mark Spahn
In the movie "Back to the Future", Doc Brown, the scientist with
Struwwelpeter hair, pronounces the word "gigawatts" as
"jiggawatts". Then Marty asks him, "What's a gigawatt?",
pronouncing the word as "giggawatt", with a hard "g". If Marty
had not heard the word before, he would repeat Doc Brown's
pronunciation "jiggawatt". This particular goof is not listed in
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/trivia?tab=gf&ref_=tt_trv_gf
, which says only
Although not widely used until after the establishment of the SI in 1960, the metric prefix "giga-" was invented in 1951, so Doc could indeed have known it in 1955. It also accounts for his choice of pronunciation.
So the prefix
"giga" was originally pronounced as "jigga", being related to
"gigantic"? A dictionary says there are four pronunciations for
this prefix: gigga, gyga, jigga, jyga. It comes from the Greek
"gigas", meaning "giant".
-- Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Alan Siegrist
Mark Spahn writes:
In the movie "Back to the Future", Doc Brown, the scientist with Struwwelpeter hair, pronounces the word "gigawatts" as "jiggawatts". Then Marty asks him, "What's a gigawatt?", pronouncing the word as "giggawatt", with a hard "g". If Marty had not heard the word before, he would repeat Doc Brown's pronunciation "jiggawatt".
Are you talking about this scene?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cYgRnfFDA
In this scene, at least to my ears, I hear Marty properly repeating Doc's peculiar pronunciation of jiggawatt.
Maybe you are referring to a different scene.
Best,
Alan Siegrist
Orinda, CA, USA
Mark Spahn
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Yes, this is the scene I'm referring to, in playing Marty's line "What the hell is a gigawatt?" repeatedly, half the time I hear it as "gigga-" (possibly because I was expecting this pronunciation?) and half the time as "jigga-". Weird.
One one of the commenters says, "Somehow, I don't think that anyone is getting the joke." Joke? There was a joke there? What's the joke?
Another commenter says, "Somehow, I don't think that anyone is getting the joke." Is *that* the joke, that they says "jigga" when almost everyone says "gigga"?
-- Mark Sp.
Alan Siegrist
Mark Spahn writes:
Are you talking about this scene?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cYgRnfFDA
In this scene, at least to my ears, I hear Marty properly repeating Doc's peculiar pronunciation of jiggawatt.
Maybe you are referring to a different scene.
--
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Yes, this is the scene I'm referring to, in playing Marty's line "What the hell is a gigawatt?" repeatedly, half the time I hear it as "gigga-" (possibly because I was expecting this pronunciation?) and half the time as "jigga-". Weird.
Yeah, weird. The first time I played it back after finding the clip, I too thought I heard Marty use the “gigga-” pronunciation. But on replaying it, I consistently heard “jigga-.”
As a side note, apparently the “jiggawatt” pronunciation of gigawatt was not so unusual way back in 1955, because the metric prefix “giga-” was taken to be of French origin and thus the initial “g” was pronounced in the French style like the name Gigi. Only later did the “gigga-” pronunciation begin to take hold widely in English. So while the “jigga-” pronunciation may have been period-appropriate for 1955, we first hear it being pronounced by the 1985-era Doc Brown so this might indeed be an anachronism.
Regards,
Mark Spahn
--
Here's another datapoint. Skip to 16:00 in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=986&v=n3uTPcxLsFo
At 16:35 the speaker refers to "a time machine powered by one point twenty-one jiggawatts of Islamophobia". The specific number 1.21, not pronounced "one point two one", indicates that the source of this pronunciation "jigga-" must have been the movie "Back to the Future". I wonder whether this person, who lacks a STEM background, has ever heard the prefix "gigga-".
-- Mark Sp.
Alan Siegrist
Mark Spahn writes:
Here's another datapoint. Skip to 16:00 in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=986&v=n3uTPcxLsFo
At 16:35 the speaker refers to "a time machine powered by one point twenty-one jiggawatts of Islamophobia". The specific number 1.21, not pronounced "one point two one", indicates that the source of this pronunciation "jigga-" must have been the movie "Back to the Future". I wonder whether this person, who lacks a STEM background, has ever heard the prefix "gigga-".
Good point. I am quite certain that he is quoting the movie. But I suspect his “jigga-” pronunciation was intended to ape Doc Brown’s frantic delivery and pronunciation for comedic effect. The speaker here is evidently well-read and probably fairly worldly about such things as electric power generation, and has probably heard the word “gigawatt” spoken with the modern “gigga-” pronunciation even if he just follows the nightly news.
Some modern English speakers quote that line from the movie BTTF but still use the “gigga-” pronunciation if they are being a bit more serious and not necessarily going for comedic effect. Here is one example:
Mark Spahn
--
But I wonder what percentage of the general public is familiar with the SI prefixes and how they are defined (as powers of 1,000). Among English majors and historians, I imagine it must be pretty low. Has anyone ever conducted a "know your prefixes" survey?
Let's review, by looking at the entry in GG5 for 単位...
In increasing order, it is "kilo mega giga tera, peta exa zetta yotta", and
in decreasing order, it is "milli micro nano pico, femto atto zepto yocto".
Rote-memorize those 16 words in order, and you'll be all set.
Note that (except for the common prefixes kilo- and milli-), all the "big" prefixes end in -a, and all the "little" prefixes end in "-o".
The analogy is with Every Good Boy Does Fine for the EGBDF lines in music notation. Maybe somebody has already set this to music. There are English-language mnemonics for the columns of the 50-Sound Table, but I prefer the bland "a ka sa ta na, ha ma ya ra wa", where each group of five syllables goes up in pitch. This avoids carrying around an annoying melody in you head every time you have to look up something in aiueo order, like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuYv-efc7d8
By the way, these prefixes can be used as nouns in themselves. Thus, "two giga" is the number 2,000,000,000. And the national debt is about 20 T$ (twenty teradollars). I prefer this spelling to putting the dollar sign in front of the number like $20 T. The reason for using the dollar sign *before* a number, as I understand it, is to prevent people from adding a digit to the left of a number on a check.
Alan Siegrist
Mark Spahn writes:
But I wonder what percentage of the general public is familiar with the SI prefixes and how they are defined (as powers of 1,000). Among English majors and historians, I imagine it must be pretty low. Has anyone ever conducted a "know your prefixes" survey?
In general, you are probably right. I’m sure even English majors and historians learned about SI prefixes and units in some general “science” class in one or two of the K-12 class levels, but promptly forgot about them.
But for whatever reason, in the US, electrical power is always measured in watts (W), kilowatts (kW) and gigawatts (GW) and not horsepower (HP) which is used much more commonly to express the power output of motor vehicle engines. Why is this? There is no reason why you couldn’t measure electrical power in HP or engine power in kW. (I don’t know, but there might be some subconscious association of horses with engines pulling wheeled vehicles, and the letter W looking a bit like a sideways lightning bolt, cementing an association with electricity.)
So anyone getting their electrical bill in the US finds that they are billed in units of kilowatt-hour (kWh) for their energy. I remember seeing ads featuring some silly cartoon character with the name Reddy Kilowatt and yes, he has lightning bolts for arms and legs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddy_Kilowatt
So although many people might not remember all of their SI prefixes and units, they might still be familiar with the watt, kilowatt and (maybe) the gigawatt.
Let's review, by looking at the entry in GG5 for 単位...
In increasing order, it is "kilo mega giga tera, peta exa zetta yotta", and
in decreasing order, it is "milli micro nano pico, femto atto zepto yocto".
Rote-memorize those 16 words in order, and you'll be all set.
Note that (except for the common prefixes kilo- and milli-), all the "big" prefixes end in -a, and all the "little" prefixes end in "-o".
The analogy is with Every Good Boy Does Fine for the EGBDF lines in music notation. Maybe somebody has already set this to music. There are English-language mnemonics for the columns of the 50-Sound Table, but I prefer the bland "a ka sa ta na, ha ma ya ra wa", where each group of five syllables goes up in pitch. This avoids carrying around an annoying melody in you head every time you have to look up something in aiueo order, like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuYv-efc7d8
By the way, these prefixes can be used as nouns in themselves. Thus, "two giga" is the number 2,000,000,000. And the national debt is about 20 T$ (twenty teradollars). I prefer this spelling to putting the dollar sign in front of the number like $20 T. The reason for using the dollar sign *before* a number, as I understand it, is to prevent people from adding a digit to the left of a number on a check.
I have always had resistance to this occasional use of SI prefixes alone as simple numbers. Perhaps the reason is that the prefixes are (admittedly confusingly) sometimes used as shorthand for units, such as “kilo” for kilogram or “gig” for gigabyte.
I never knew the reason why the dollar sign traditionally appears to the left of the number, but now that you mention it, that would make sense in specific instances as when writing checks. But this order has become the convention even though it is opposite the order in which the symbols are read. I have seen instances of the dollar sign coming after the number like 2 T$, but I find it jarring and “wrong.” In my translation work, I regularly reorder this as “$2 T.”
Perhaps one reason I do this is to avoid any possible confusion between US dollars (traditionally written with the dollar sign to the left) and dollars as the currencies of other countries such as the Australian dollar (A$), New Zealand dollar (NZ$) or most confusingly the Bahamian dollar (B$). One might not know exactly whether “2 B$” is intended to mean “two billion US dollars” or the vastly less-valuable “two Bahamian dollars.”
One even more peculiar abbreviation I see is “U$” which is apparently intended to mean US dollars as a sort of shortening of the already shortened “US $”.
Mark Spahn
I learned, as a bit of 雑学 that has been cluttering my mind for decades, that the dollar sign came from the US of United States, with the two letters superimposed on each other. But different explanations are offered by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign
-- Mark Sp.