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Comment by djur | Hacker News Reader

The word is skunked at this point. Using it guarantees that readers are going to have to pause and refer to the context, and depending on the context it may not even be possible to confidently disambiguate. Luckily both meanings have ample synonyms.

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I think it should join "billion" in never being ever used again due to its ambiguity.

It just doesn't have the same ring to call someone a "milliardare"

How is "billion" ambiguous?

Does it mean something other than 1,000,000,000?

EDIT: Apparently in some cultures, it means a million million, ie, 1,000,000,000,000, or what most people would call "trillion".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

For the last several decades, every English speaking country has used the short billion (1e9).

Yep, even the BBC surrendered to the Americanism.

According to Wikipedia's summary of the situation, the French are to blame for the ambiguity - no surprises there! ;) But if we're going to avoid Americanisms, the better way is simply to use the word 'milliard', which makes perfect, unambiguous sense in any language.

Except that it's a terrible word because milli means thousand, and ard just means a grammatical modification.

So all that accomplishes is conflating thousand with million with billion. (Of course "million" is already a conflation of "thousand"!)

Oh, good point... Right, back to the drawing board - how about "kilocount" for a thousand, "megacount" for a million, and "gigacounts" for a (short) billion? The prefixes were apparently resurrected from the Greek for use in the metric system, but haven't had any other contradictory meanings as far as I can tell. I know I'm mixing up the Greek and Latin roots with "-count", but "kiloarithmos" is two syllables too many!

It's impressive how many "journalists" get this wrong when copying news written in English.

… I’m entirely nonplussed by your use of ‘skunked’.

What’s awesome about words is we can just say whatever bullshit we want and if anyone understands and repeats it, bam, new words!

They don’t start off in the dictionary!

I love "anon" for that reason.

"I will be there anon!"

If anyone complains about me being there either too early or too late, or neither, I point them to the dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anon

It can either mean "now", "soon", or "later".

Oh, how interesting - I had a personal 'eggcorn' interpretation that it was an elision of "and on" (which also makes sense in many contexts), and never connected it to the word "anon" in writing!

Works the same if you don't say "anon" at all.

It's the term Bryan Garner uses for words that are inconsistent in meaning in a way that makes them difficult to use effectively:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunked_term

I'm not sure what his origin was for the term, but "skunked" as an adjective to me indicates a beer that was spoiled by exposure to light and/or heat. It's gone off.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

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