Boss Radio

It's amazing how one bit of bad information can stay with you all your life. One day our English teacher set us an essay on the subject 'The sense of nonsense', and he said he would give zero points to anyone who misspelled it. To emphasise his point he wrote 'SENCE' on the board. Ooh, and I so nearly got it wrong. I copied it down and used that spelling throughout my essay.

He thought I was trying to be funny.

I, on the other hand, had to check the spelling before I could write this piece thanks to his little attempt at humour.

The first time I saw the word 'halcyon' I read it - dyslexia being what it is - as 'halycon', and the first time I used it I mispronounced it, much to the amusement of the surrounding throng. So I made a mental note that what I thought it was was wrong, and now I get it right about 50% of the time.

If only I could remember which was right and which was wrong in the first place...

With thanks to either a typo or someone's rank ignorace I once read that a mile was 1,700 yards. Since the author of that little gem was a citizen of the USA I assumed that this was just one more of those little things that the USA did differently to everyone else. For several years of my life I went around telling people that a US mile wasn't as long as an imperial mile. I didn't actually go around just telling people of course, but if it came up in conversation I was ready with the trivia, so there are probably several hundred people who now think that US and UK miles are different things, and that if you're a USAian you can drive slightly faster over here...

Now I've finally got it right someone's going to write and comment that a US mile is 1,700 yards. Go on, feel free to screw me up some more.

When I was a kid I knew that bi- meant two and tri- meant three because of bicycles, biplanes, tricycles, and triplanes. It was therefore obvious to me that a billion was two million and a trillion was three million. I explained this to a whole lot of my friends and acquaintances. Finally my dad put me right. A billion was a million to the power of two, and a trillion was a million to the power of three. I thought it was silly - why would anyone need numbers that big? - but it did make a kind of logical sense.

Enter the USA again. For reasons best known to some obviously subnormal maths teacher they decided that a billion was a thousand million, therefore a trillion was a million to the power of two. Now I'm sorry but I can find no logic in that whatsoever. Try as I may I can make no sencese of that, it's positively the most stupid thing I've ever heard of in my life (Well close anyway), and when the government of Britain decided to go along with the US definition I was right there at the forefront of the don't be silly campaign (We're just so polite over here...).

Thanks to the credit crunch I now feel more than justified in that particular opinion. There are people on the TV news talking about trillions like it's small change. Now what are we going to call a really large sum of money? I think this time the USA should adopt our logical definition before they have to start inventing new words.

Which I will, of course, only have trouble with.

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Now here's an interesting little thing that I discovered whilst typing this little missive. If your right hand slips one key to the left whilst you're typing, 'mile' comes out as 'nuke'.

You learn something new every day.