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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 refers to the number 20). That is akin to French where 87 is written quatre-vingt sept, which literally translates as four twenties [and] seven. Cueball (possibly representing Randall) likes the idea of unusual ways to refer to numbers so he uses a metric prefix to state the population of the town.
Metric prefixes can be added to a unit to scale up or down its magnitude; for example, "kilo-" increases the unit's magnitude by a factor of 1,000, so a kilometer is as long as 1,000 meters. Although metric prefixes can be added to all sorts of units, they're not ordinarily added to number words to modify their magnitude[citation needed] (Y2K being a noteworthy exception). The expression "kilofive" to mean 5,000 is therefore unusual. Such modification of magnitude can be accomplished by adding the corresponding word, for example in this case "five thousand".
Taking "kilofive" to be a unit meaning 5,000, the population of East Hills, 6,000, can therefore be expressed as 1.2 kilofives.
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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