Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 April 13

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April 13

Waiter and waitress

Why does the word "waitress" continue to be standard unlike other words for jobs ending in -ess?? Georgia guy (talk) 01:17, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Not the only one. There are still Academy Awards for Best Performance by an Actress. In Commonwealth countries the wife of a male mayor is still the Lady Mayoress, not the lady Mayor.

On the other hand, our departed colleague User:Medeis would have cut you to ribbons if you used "waitress" in her presence. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:15, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

JackOfOz -- "Lady Mayoress" in that usage is not an occupational title in the ordinary sense, but a marital honorific. There used to be a number of these in English (e.g. Ambassadress = "wife of an ambassador"), and many more in some continental European languages, but they're rather archaic in modern English, with a few exceptions such as "duchess" etc. AnonMoos (talk) 13:37, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

When I go to restaurants, they invariably use the term "server" to describe themselves. Maybe it's different where you are. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 04:12, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

And then there is the charming "wait staff". Where I live, "waitress" is passé. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 05:24, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Meanwhile, where I live "waitress" is absolutely normal. Heck, around here "waiters" (ie: men) are the distinct minority. --Khajidha (talk) 05:34, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

If anything, in my area "waitress" is the more or less normal term with "waiter" being used only when necessary to specify males. It's almost, but not quite, to the level of "male nurse". --Khajidha (talk) 14:21, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

At least it hasn't devolved into murse yet. Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 17:13, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- it probably has to do with the fact that until recent years, higher-end fancy restaurants were more likely to have male waiters, while lower-end diners and such predominantly had waitresses... AnonMoos (talk) 13:00, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

(e/c) While I'm at the restaurant (Ontario, Canada), server is the norm, but anecdotally when I ask someone their job in a social setting, they say waitress. Old habits die hard, I guess. The introductions made at the table, "Hi, I'm Amy and I'll be your server..." is a form of boilerplate which is probably set by the company in accordance with the law. Off the record, people often fall back on the old standards. Matt Deres (talk) 13:08, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

In South Africa, the gender neutral waitron is used, though it always makes me think of "A robotic or mechanical waiter." from Etymology 2. -- ToE 20:27, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

In the early 80s, I remember dining at a classy restaurant in Glasgow, and being impressed that thye had a female waiter. At that time, a restaurant of that kind had both waiters and waitresses, and they did different jobs and dressed entirely differently (and not just because of their sex). The waiter took your order, and advised you on your meal, and especially on your wine. The waitress brought your food and cleared away your dishes. I suspect that this separation no longer holds, but I don't frequent fancy restaurants. --ColinFine (talk) 19:21, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

K for "thousand"

When approximately the letter K started to designate "thousand" in English language? I feel like it's a relatively recent trend and before that the number was presented either numerically or spelled out. Thanks. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 13:56, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Checking Newspapers.com (a pay site), terms like 5K and 10K foot races were pretty common by 1975, the K being short for "kilometers". As to K in general, I can't find a reference, but it wouldn't be surprising if it was influenced by the K suffix as in "kilobytes". <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 14:35, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Kilo- says it was stadardised in France in 1799 and was used in the UK during the 19th century. Ngram viewer shows kilo and kilogram growing in the 2nd half of the 19th century.--Phil Holmes (talk) 15:12, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

But I somewhat doubt that back then they would write eg. 10K spectators instead of 10,000 spectators, as they often do now. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 16:16, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

In (at least American) English, the abbreviation for 1000, informally, used to be "Grand" abbreviated "G", so you would see thinks like $100G meaning "100,000 dollars". This article from the good old Straight Dope dates the general usage to the 1940s, with an earlier usage restricted to money being even older. It notes the usage of "K" for 1000 being newer, without giving a good date. Anecdotally, the first time I had seen "K" in such a usage was in reference to computers and "kilobytes", (in which usage it stands for 1024, being the closest power of 2 to 1000, but that is ONLY in that ONE context) sometime in the 1980s, the application to all uses came later from my point of view, but that's just a personal observation. --Jayron32 16:30, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• But "grand" isn't the same anyway; it's only ever used with monetary amounts, meaning "$1000" (later also "£1000") and not "1000". --76.71.6.31 (talk) 20:49, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Strictly, it's Kibibyte for 1024 bytes, kilobyte for 1000; But in non-technical practice "kilobyte" has often been used to mean either. Bazza (talk) 16:55, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

The term "kilobyte" for 1024 bytes was in use long before someone came up with the term "kibibyte".  --Lambiam 19:41, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes. I would have used "kilobyte" for 1024 bytes in the 1960s, and it was well established then. HiLo48 (talk) 00:37, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Outside of a very small and insular community of technical writers in the specific field, that particular usage has not caught on. Most English speakers continue to use the "kilo" usage, however much so that the IEC wished that they didn't. --Jayron32 17:00, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I would wager that most people don't even think about (quite possibly don't even know about) the 1024 thing and think of kilo, mega, etc with their ordinary base 10 meanings. Or even just memorize the order without thinking of the actual size. --Khajidha (talk) 17:11, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

In most contexts, if you need to know the difference between binary-kilo (or its horid "official" name of "kibi") and decimal-kilo, you'll have learned it pretty darned quickly; for most of the population, just recognizing that it's 1000(ish) is good enough. Understanding and comparing the relative sizes of, say, storage media and computer files as expressed in kilobytes, megabytes, etc. in a general sense it isn't really necessary to know the difference at all, where as long as you get the orders of magnitude correct, you're fine. For people doing highly technical work where knowing the exact number of bytes and bits IS super important, yeah, the difference matters, but lets face it, if you've been working in a field where it matters for longer than about a day, and haven't been taught the difference (or figured it out yet) then you probably aren't going to be doing that job on your second day. And for the rest of us, it doesn't matter. It's basically curious trivia and not much else. --Jayron32 20:27, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

In the late 20th century, some in the United States probably mainly encountered "kilo" as a unit of measurement for amounts of illicit drugs in news stories and "K" as an arbitrary designator for the lengths of charity runs, and may not have made much connection between the two, much less with the numerical meaning "thousand" (note that the word "kilo" is pronounced in English with a different stress position, and totally different vowels, than the word "kilometer")... AnonMoos (talk) 19:20, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

That would depend on whether one says "kil-O-mətə" or "KIL-ə-mee-tə" (or their rhotic variants). I use the latter, because the former, to me, suggests some sort of measuring device (cf. thermometer, micrometer) rather than a distance. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:39, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Carl Sagan said it "KILL-uh-meters", which makes consistent sense. You don't say the mass of something is some number of "kill-AH-grums", for example. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 23:51, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

But consistency is not a virtue here, as I see it: "kill-O-me-ter" is more practical precisely because it doesn't sound so much like KILL-o-gram". --76.71.6.31 (talk) 03:29, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

The common pronunciations KIlo (1st-syllable stress) and kiLOMeter (2nd-syllable stress) are parallel to PHOto and phoTOGraphy etc... AnonMoos (talk) 04:29, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

But not consistent with how anyone pronounces centimetre, or almost every other similar unit. HiLo48 (talk) 04:39, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I have in fact heard cenTImeter, but it's pretty rare. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:51, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm still waiting to hear somebody say milLILitre. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:05, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

If we can get back to the original question: the OED Online says the K=1024 usage in the computing field came first (their earliest quoted usage is from 1966 and reads in part "...for example, 4096 characters, bytes or words... the convention is to refer to this number as 4K") and this was quickly followed by K=1000 (earliest quotation is 1968, reading in part: Engineers, Mini-Micro Programmers... Salaries $15-45K"). The first example quoted that isn't computer-related is dated 1985. So it seems clear that we programmers gave it to the rest of the world. --76.71.6.31 (talk) 20:49, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

This banking forum has a respondant who wrote: "Somewhere down the line, it changed to K (for kilo) around the early '90's". Apparently a previous notation was "M" for thousand and "MM" for million, but I think this may be US specific (never heard of it in 25 years in the City of London). That's the best that Google could find for me. Alansplodge (talk) 21:23, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• That Roman-numeral-prefix usage is not entirely dead. In 2015 I bought a container of wood filler and the label didn't say how long it took to dry, so I searched online for technical specifications, which I found here, but they didn't say either. However, I was surprised to see that the spec sheet did give the viscosity of the stuff (on page 2), and in an unfamiliar unit: "Mcps" (and it still does). So I naturally wrote to Russ Rowlett, who wrote back and also added it to his online dictionary of units: it turns out to mean "thousand centipoises"! As he says, "This is a jarring addition of an obsolete English prefix to a metric unit, and its use risks a major misunderstanding since M- is the metric prefix for a million rather than a thousand. 1 Mcps equals 10 poises, so the proper name of the unit is decapoise (daP)." Not onlt that, but it first scales the poise down, then up again! And worse yet, "MMcps" can be found with the meaning "million centipoise". Russ turned up US patent 5853645, from 1998, which contains both "Mcps" and "MMcps", explicitly defined as I have indicated. Arrgh. (I don't know if that last URL is durable; if not, you can search for the patent number under uspto.gov.) --76.71.6.31 (talk) 03:29, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the only people talking of Kilobyte in the 60es and 70es were programmers, and they meant invariably 1024 Byte. Much later, when John A. Verage began to buy hard discs in the 80es and 90es, some vendors introduced the 1000 Byte KB to suggest they hard disks were larger than the ones of the competition. During the cold war theoreticist of war began to talk of Kilo and Megadeads, which some of the prospective ones found cynical someway. So it can be that the modern use of K and M was introduced by the programmers. 2003:F5:6F14:7B00:4999:52FA:30FB:CA06 (talk) 22:18, 13 April 2020 (UTC) Marco PB

I've worked in I.T. for decades, and none of my colleagues have ever used the term "Kibibyte". That must be a term used by machine-code level coders. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 23:51, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

This once-upon-a-time machine level coder had never heard of a "kibibyte" until today. My 2020 spell checker doesn't even approve of it. I have used the term "kilobyte" since 1967. HiLo48 (talk) 00:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

My apologies to the bit-pushers out there. :) That alleged word "kibibyte" is not in EO.[1] "Kilobyte" is.[2] This sounds like one of those things that someone tried to invent but it never caught in. Kind of like the Edsel. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 01:20, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

At least physical Edsels can sometimes be seen in classic car shows and museums. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 05:00, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

"Kibibyte" sounds like it would be some kind of mini-snack made by the Keebler Elves. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:21, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I feel like a number of respondents are focusing on the history of kilobyte without establishing first if that's actually the route K took to being the familiar short-form for thousand. As a semi-old fart - and non-American - I used kilometers and kilograms long before I had cause to use kilobytes. I'd like to see a reference that points to computer usage as the main route. Matt Deres (talk) 13:21, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Of course "kilometer" and "kilogram" have been in use since the late 18th–early 19th century. But did you use the majuscule letter "K" to denote "kilo-", whether as "Kmeter" and "Kgram" or as "Km" and "Kg"? The standard symbol for this metric prefix is a minuscule "k", while the majuscule is the standard symbol for kelvin, so its use to stand for 1000 or 1024 is non-standard, potentially ambiguous in physics texts, and discouraged.  --Lambiam 16:46, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

I did cite a reference: the OED Online. --76.71.6.31 (talk) 17:32, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough, though I feel like that was more like correlation rather than causation. What I'm getting at is that, although k gets used in printing now, it's also an oral short form that gets used all the time in metric countries. "He was going ten k over the limit." "It's fifty k to Toronto; you'd better leave now." "I'm doing a ten k run on Saturday". The kilobyte model implies that none of that took place prior to the rise of personal computing and the general increase in familiarity of memory values. Matt Deres (talk) 14:34, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

But Matt's talking about a different usage: his K appears to mean kilometers per hour in one instance, and kilometers in the other. It has nothing to do with saying 50K to mean 50,000, which is what the question was about. And by the way, while I have indeed heard of "10K runs" (meaning 10 km), I've never heard K used to mean km/h. (I'm in Canada, which is only a sort-of-metric country.) --76.71.6.31 (talk) 02:28, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

The senses "kilometre" and "thousand" are both listed for the entry "k" in Wiktionary – without dates. The usage is also mentioned at "klick". The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the slang use meaning "one thousand dollars" dates from the 1970s.^[3]  --Lambiam 07:32, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm also a Canadian (Albertan) and "K" to mean "km/h" is very common where I live, although it is perhaps more common to omit any reference to the unit of speed: "10 over the limit", "He's going 50", etc. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:51, 18 April 2020 (UTC)