That's good and complicated, but let me add another silly cultural tradition.
K is also used contextually in American culture to represent thousands of dollars. So you might see headlines that say "School board budgets 20K for sports equipment" to indicate an expenditure of $20,000. It usually has a dollar sign in front (e.g. "$20K") but I've been seeing it lately without as well.
I second the weirdness about the running distances. You often see references to races as being 5K or 10K. In fact an extension of it was not that long ago when my work fitness center was involved in a program to give people pedometers and try to get them to walk 10,000 steps a day. The program is called "Ten-K-a-day". They even use the domain - http://demo.10kaday.com/.
Americans will never really GET the metric system, I think that's about the only conclusion you can really draw from all this. ;-)
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Fascinating
Date: 2006-02-15 04:49 am (UTC)K is also used contextually in American culture to represent thousands of dollars. So you might see headlines that say "School board budgets 20K for sports equipment" to indicate an expenditure of $20,000. It usually has a dollar sign in front (e.g. "$20K") but I've been seeing it lately without as well.
I second the weirdness about the running distances. You often see references to races as being 5K or 10K. In fact an extension of it was not that long ago when my work fitness center was involved in a program to give people pedometers and try to get them to walk 10,000 steps a day. The program is called "Ten-K-a-day". They even use the domain - http://demo.10kaday.com/.
Americans will never really GET the metric system, I think that's about the only conclusion you can really draw from all this. ;-)