[opendtv] Re: California Prepares to Limit TV Energy Use
- From: Tom Barry <trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:31:33 -0400
Cliff Benham wrote:
> Some microwave guys from Speery I know call them 'jigacycles' and
> 'jigawatts'. So that may be where it came from...
>
From the NY Times:
<http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/you-say-gigawatt-i-say-jigowatt/>
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April 8, 2008 , /12:56 pm/
You Say Gigawatt, I Say Jigowatt
By Richard S. Chang
<http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/author/richard-s-chang/>
DeLoreanLauren Reilly’s 1981 DeLorean DMC-12. (Mark Rabiner for The New
York Times)
In the course of writing about Lauren Reilly’s DeLorean
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/automobiles/collectibles/06EGO.html>,
I came across a strange dilemma concerning one of the quotes from “Back
to the Future.”
In the scene where Marty McFly tells Young Doc Brown the amount of
energy needed to power the flux capacitor, Brown has a minor meltdown.
“1.21 JIGOWATTS!” he says over and over. That’s how it’s written in the
script — jigowatt. But you won’t find the word in the dictionary. What
you will find is gigawatt. And since we pronounce gigabyte with a hard
g, it seems logical that gigawatt would follow suit.
According to BTTF.com <http://www.bttf.com/>, an unofficial movie fan
site, the subject was addressed in the Special Edition DVD by Bob Gale,
the movie’s producer, in his voice-over commentary
<http://www.bttf.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-33678.html> during the
scene with the scale model:
I should talk about jigowatts for a second.
The proper pronunciation is, of course, gigawatts [with a hard g
sound], and when Bob [Zemeckis] and I were doing research, we talked
to somebody who mispronounced it jigowatts. And we were actually
completely unfamiliar with the term, and we thought that was how it
was supposed to be said. It does come from the Greek root gigas
[that Greek root is pronounced with a j sound, not a g sound], for
gigantic, so I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. But
never having heard of it, we actually spelled it in the script
jigowatt. So a jigowatt is actually supposed to be a gigawatt, a
million watts. So the mystery of the gigawatts is now solved.
I wish it were that simple. According to Wikipedia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_future>, the official National
Institute of Standards and Technology pronunciation is with a soft g.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists two pronunciations
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigawatt>: soft g first, then
followed by a hard g.
It seems Doc Brown was right all along.
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