For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”

  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    3 months ago

    The kilometre—with the accent on the ki and the re ending—is a unit of distance. A kilometer—with the accent on the lo and the er ending—would be a device that measures kilos, like perhaps a bathroom scale? centimetre, millimetre, speedometer, altimeter.

    I’m actually fairly forgiving about people saying it the wrong way, but when Siri gives me GPS directions, it really grinds my gears. She should know better!

    • Fleur__@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      3 months ago

      Kilo is just a prefix meaning thousand. Your bathroom scale doesn’t measure kilos it measures grams in sets of 1000.

      Well technically it measures newtons but I digress

      • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        Ooh, I sense the presence of another hill! The vernacular use of “kilo” as short for “kilogram” must stop?

        I love that in the US media, you only ever hear about kilos in the context of drug seizures. Those evil drug lords poisoning the youth with bastardized metric jargon…

    • tychosmoose@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 months ago

      It makes sense. But as a US speaker it just makes me want to stick to my guns and generalize our second syllable stress on these units. I’m team kilogram now. And centimeter.

      Found a new hill!

      • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 months ago

        Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure I did hear an American say altimeter once? I suppose if you were consistent in reversing all the rules, it could be chalked up to a dialect variation? I’ll let it go in that case. :)

      • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        Oh yeah! I still have one of those from the days when our son still lived with us and started crypto mining on my dime.