[opendtv] Re: California Prepares to Limit TV Energy Use
- From: Tom Barry <trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:08:40 -0400
In between stints in physics and computers I majored for a couple years
in Human Communications. There I once took a language theory course
that suggested in most any language a word that gets frequently used
will evolve to become shorter and/or easier to pronounce. It's my
belief that the jiga prefix was probably correct before we computer guys
got a hold of it and actually had things to commonly discuss with
counts in the billions, whereupon it became pronounce giga, with a hard g.
So I think both Doc Markley and Doc Brown were right at the time but the
j pronunciation has changed and is no longer correct.
- Tom
Hunold, Ken wrote:
> Well, "Doctor Don" Markley, my old college professor's use of
> jigacycles, jigahertz, and jigawatts predates BTTF by at least ten
> years. In his honor, I've tried to use this pronunciation wherever I
> can get away with it.
>
> Ken Hunold
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Tom Barry
> Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 12:32 AM
> To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [opendtv] Re: California Prepares to Limit TV Energy Use
>
> Cliff Benham wrote:
>
>> Some microwave guys from Speery I know call them 'jigacycles' and
>> 'jigawatts'. So that may be where it came from...
>>
>>
> >From the NY Times:
> <http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/you-say-gigawatt-i-say-jigow
> att/>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> April 8, 2008 , /12:56 pm/
>
>
> You Say Gigawatt, I Say Jigowatt
>
> By Richard S. Chang
> <http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/author/richard-s-chang/>
>
> DeLoreanLauren Reilly's 1981 DeLorean DMC-12. (Mark Rabiner for The New
> York Times)
>
> In the course of writing about Lauren Reilly's DeLorean
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/automobiles/collectibles/06EGO.html>,
> I came across a strange dilemma concerning one of the quotes from "Back
> to the Future."
>
> In the scene where Marty McFly tells Young Doc Brown the amount of
> energy needed to power the flux capacitor, Brown has a minor meltdown.
> "1.21 JIGOWATTS!" he says over and over. That's how it's written in the
> script - jigowatt. But you won't find the word in the dictionary. What
> you will find is gigawatt. And since we pronounce gigabyte with a hard
> g, it seems logical that gigawatt would follow suit.
>
> According to BTTF.com <http://www.bttf.com/>, an unofficial movie fan
> site, the subject was addressed in the Special Edition DVD by Bob Gale,
> the movie's producer, in his voice-over commentary
> <http://www.bttf.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-33678.html> during the
> scene with the scale model:
>
> I should talk about jigowatts for a second.
>
> The proper pronunciation is, of course, gigawatts [with a hard g
> sound], and when Bob [Zemeckis] and I were doing research, we talked
> to somebody who mispronounced it jigowatts. And we were actually
> completely unfamiliar with the term, and we thought that was how it
> was supposed to be said. It does come from the Greek root gigas
> [that Greek root is pronounced with a j sound, not a g sound], for
> gigantic, so I suppose it's not beyond the realm of possibility. But
> never having heard of it, we actually spelled it in the script
> jigowatt. So a jigowatt is actually supposed to be a gigawatt, a
> million watts. So the mystery of the gigawatts is now solved.
>
> I wish it were that simple. According to Wikipedia
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_future>, the official National
> Institute of Standards and Technology pronunciation is with a soft g.
> The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists two pronunciations
> <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigawatt>: soft g first, then
> followed by a hard g.
>
> It seems Doc Brown was right all along.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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