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| 1.2 Kilofives |
 Title text: 'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.' |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by 83.333... millidozen BOTS, Y2K reference added by ZC - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address features the phrase "four score and seven" to refer to 87: a "score" is a group of 20, which literally translates as "four-twenties [and] seven". This is because English used to count by twenties - for a while, a hundred actually referred to 120 - however, this practice has died off and most English speakers nowadays would not use "score" in such a manner. Inspired by this, Cueball (possibly representing Randall) decides to use unusual prefixes to state the population of a town.
Metric prefixes can be added to a unit to scale up or down its magnitude. For example, "kilo-" means "multiply by 1000", so a kilometer is as long as 1,000 meters. These prefixes are added to various metric units but, due to their usefulness have been adopted and added to other, non-metric units such as "kilocubic feet per second" (for the flow rate of a liquid, much to Randall's chagrin when researching for his book "XKCD What-If"), "megadeath" (how many millions killed in an estimated nuclear blast), and the most argumentative "kilo/mega/terabyte" despite objects from both the IEEE and the BIPM. However, they're not ordinarily added before number words to change their magnitude.
Taking "kilofive" to be a unit meaning 5,000, the population of East Hills, 6,000, can therefore be expressed as 1.2 kilofives. But phrasing a number this way requires the listener to make excess calculations to understand it, so White Hat would probably get confused or annoyed.
It is somewhat common for metric prefixes to go after numbers in abbreviations. Well-known examples are "Y2K" for "year 2000", and "4K resolution" for "4,000 [pixels]". The number 5,000 is abbreviated as "5K" in several phrases such as the "5K run" and "5K resolution". However, the prefix is implied to modify an unstated unit afterwards—the "five-kilometer run", "five-kilopixel resolution"—not the preceding number. And saying "1.2 5K" would be even more awkward, liable to be misunderstood as "1.25k" or 1,250.
In the title text, Cueball has apparently annoyed White Hat with his confusing expressions of numbers, but he doubles down, now directly including the word "score". 50 milliscore, or 50 × 1⁄1000 × 20, would be equal to 1.
The comic might refer to the village of East Hills, New York. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 7,284, or 1.214 kilosixes.
Trivia
In Roman numerals, symbols can be added to numerals to denote orders of magnitude. In this system, 1,000 might be written as "CIↃ". This rough pattern of marks, as typically chisled or impressed into wax by a stylus, would later be refined and expressed in the not dissimilar shape of the "M" as most often seen these days to represent the thousands value in dates/etc. Alternately "I" (nominally '1') could be given a bar above it, as would any other such numerals involve in that expression, to indicate the value being denoted being of the higher order.
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [Cueball, with his palm raised, is talking to White Hat. There is a sign on the ground in the background.]
- Cueball: It's a pretty small town—the population is just 1.2 kilofives.
- [The sign reads:]
- Welcome to
- East Hills
- Pop. 6,000
- [Caption below the panel:]
- I don't know why Abraham Lincoln should be the only one who gets to come up with weird ways to say normal numbers.
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