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1.2 Kilofives

Title text: 'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

Explanation

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. This is akin to French, where 87 is written quatre-vingt sept, which literally translates as "four-twenties [and] seven". However, most English speakers nowadays would only recognize this poetic usage of "score" from Lincoln's speech. Inspired by this, Cueball (possibly representing Randall) uses a metric prefix 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-" raises 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 before number words to change their magnitude. With that in mind, the expression "kilofive" for 5,000 is unusual; the number would usually be spoken "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. 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

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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