2132: Percentage Styles
Explanation
This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a Classicist and a Mathematician. The table based on the graph needs to be edited, giving a percentage approval rating to the different styles of writing. This may pick up an item at 65% which would be neat. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
On March 29, 2019, The AP Stylebook changed a long-standing rule that forbade press writers from using the percent sign (%) when writing percentages. This had long been a controversial rule, leading to much debate over the preferable way to write percentages, before the Associated Press finally conceded the point.
The comic lists the best to worst ways in which you can write out phrases that are phonetically the same as "65%". They go from the common "65%" and "65 percent" to "65 per cent," which is not common in Randall's area and time, to the eccentric "sixty-five%" and "65 per¢" (using the cent currency symbol) which are not used in normal writing and would stand out like a sore thumb when read. The middle option, "65 per cent", was common in older literature, along with "65 per cent.", using "cent." as an abbreviation for "centum", which is Latin for "hundred". ("per" in Latin translates to "through", "for", and several other English prepositions.) The entire string would translate to "65 for every hundred." "Per cent" is more widely used in British English than in American English today.
A small gap between the ends of the bar and the best and worst options may suggest the existence of even better and worse options not listed in this comic, such as "65/¢".
Other abbreviations not mentioned in the comic include "pct.", "pct" or "pc". See Percentage.
The title text references the ambiguity of hard and soft C in English. In Classical Latin, "C" is always pronounced like "K". However, in English, most "C"s before E, I and Y (including "percent") are soft, and pronounced like "S". In academia, Latin students are taught the Classical Latin pronunciations of words, rather than the pronunciation used by the Catholic church. Some students of Latin may adopt the Latin pronunciation of English words derived from Latin. Such people may tend more to pronounce, even when not the correct choice, "celtic" like "keltic" (this is the correct choice, except for the basketball team), "caesar" like "kaiser", or "cent" like "kent" (although since this involves obviously saying something others aren't going to understand unless they took the same classes, it might as well be "per kentum").
People sometimes train a cat out of a bad behavior, such as scratching upholstery, by spritzing the cat with water when the cat does the undesired behavior. In this case, Randall's friends found him so annoying they trained him out saying "per kent" by spraying him with water every time he pronounced it that way. Training people this way was previously a punchline in 220: Philosophy, while training a cat this way was previously a punchline in 1786: Trash.
Table
Percentage label | Percent good | Explanation | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
65% | This is the standard symbol | |||
65 percent | This one has no space, it is more common in American English | |||
65 per cent | This one has a space, it is more common in British English | |||
65 per¢ | This one uses the cent symbol in place of the word cent, which is rarely, if ever, used in this context.
Transcript
DiscussionThe only proper style for Britain and the US is ‘%65’. Aasasd (talk) 16:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
There's also 65/100, 65:100, , sixtyfive-hundreth, 0.65, and point sixty-five. Benny. 16:41, 3 April 2019 (UTC) There's also 650‰ 172.69.33.41 16:52, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Even lower than 65 per¢ should be 65 per penny. -boB (talk) 20:00, 3 April 2019 (UTC) ==BTW, I can imagine the transcript of this one posing some challenge for screen readers. Aasasd (talk) 17:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC) \´65
This may have come up because last Friday the A.P. Stylebook announced their changes for 2019, including a change to percent. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/ap-says-the-percentage-sign-now-ok-when-used-with-a-numeral-thats-shift5/ MissingCompile here the missing styles:
162.158.79.191 19:35, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, Randall dropped the ball on this one. I am disappoint. At the very least there should have been an entry where "per" was written as "/". Also since the cent sign is not on most keyboards but the dollar sign is, I would have expected "6500/$". Also, google agrees: https://www.google.com/search?q=6500%2F%24+in+cent^-1 :p 141.101.96.187 07:30, 4 April 2019 (UTC) I was waiting for 650‰ or even 6500‱. Maybe next time. JohnHawkinson (talk) 23:13, 5 April 2019 (UTC) What about 65/¢ or even sixty-five/¢? (sorry, this wiki doesn't use math markup at all, so not even comments can contain it). 172.68.50.37 10:17, 9 March 2023 (UTC) = Celtic =I suggest you remove the reference to "celtic". In modern English it's rarely pronounced "seltic" except in the names of a couple of sports teams. There is a substantial discussion of this online - just Google "pronounce celtic". Irish people are Celtic and almost zero Irish say "seltic" - except in relation to Glasgow Celtic football club. 162.158.38.190 08:28, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
}][{4³²1 Narrow non-breaking space missingRandall disappoints tbh. The omly proper way would be 65 %. --172.68.50.160 22:52, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
C in Latin“In Classical Latin, "C" is always pronounced like "K".” – that’s wrong. It depends on the school (and maybe also the country). Where I learned Latin, most c were pronounced like the German z (for example in Caesar). --DaB. (talk) 13:01, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
@ IP 108.162.241.52, please do not """"correct"""" the pronunciation of kaiser (Caesar) to 'keezer' again. That isn't how Latin is pronounced. Hyperum (talk) 04:34, 10 April 2019 (UTC) centum vs. cent vs. pennyIn this context, "cent" is an abbreviation for the Latin word "centum", meaning 100. In English, the word "cent" means 1/100th of a dollar, which is one of the three official versions of the currency of the United States. They are: dollars, dimes, and cents. Substituting cent (currency) for cent (abbreviation for "centum") is a malapropism. But "penny" refers to British currency, not American. The penny (plural:pence) was 1/240 of a pound until decimalization in the 1970s, and 1/100 of a pound thereafter. Americans often refer to a one-cent coin as a "penny", but this is just a nickname, not the actual name of the coin or the value of the coin. The name of the coin is one cent. Its value is 1 cent, which equals 1/10 of a dime, or 1/100 of a dollar. Changing centum --> cent--> penny would be a double malapropism. This begs the question, how far can we push beyond the boundaries of reason? Indeed, that is the entire spirit of Randall's premise here. Why stop with a double malapropism? We could use centum --> cent --> scent. Heck, why not centum --> cent --> penny --> penne --> macaroni --> Marconi --> Tesla. Where do we stop? Common sense tells me I'm way over the line. But common cents tell me nothing.162.158.107.79 14:31, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
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