Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 October 29

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October 29

What languages use (the equivalent of) the long scale names billiard, trilliard, etc.

WP article Long and short scales states that some languages which use the long scale use the words billiard, trilliard, etc. to mean a thousand billion, a thousand trillion, etc. However there are actual sources only for the German language (Billiarde, Trilliarde, etc.)

Does any language other than German use equivalent terms? I'm fairly certain French (which otherwise also uses the long scale) uses only milliard (i.e. no -illiard number above that).

Thanks.

Contact Basemetal here 02:16, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

PS: WP article Names of large numbers does mention billiard,, trilliard, etc. but someone flagged them as unsourced. Someone may want to add the German sources before some deletionist gets to that paragraph.

"billiard" will be very rarely used in any language (as "quadrillion" is in English), since 10¹⁵ is a very large number that only really pops up in areas of science that go far outside the realm of everyday perception. French Wikipedia uses "billiard" in the rare cases where it's needed ("L'Encyclopedia Galactica est une encyclopédie fictive élaborée par une civilisation étendue à l'ensemble de la galaxie et contenant la totalité du savoir accumulé par une société d'un billiard d'individus durant des milliers d'années d'histoire."), as does Spanish ("El petámetro es una unidad de longitud equivalente a 10¹⁵ metros (un billardo)."), Swedish, Czech and quite a few others. More than anything, I think it's just too unfamiliar to occur often. An English pop-science magazine would probably say "There a million billion synapses in the human brain", because that's a bit more familiar than "There are a quadrillion synapses in the human brain" – similiarly, Spanish Wikipedia says "En niños alcanza los [the number of synapses] 1000 billones." rather than "un billiardo". Smurrayinchester 08:44, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

"English" above means "English before Harold Wilson changed the meaning for the UK". The Finns have biljardi, but it's rare. To avoid confusion, for international readership, 10¹⁵ is best described as a thousand million million, since this translates as the same number in most languages. (As mentioned earlier, it would be a thousand billion, not a million billion, in older English.) Dbfirs 08:49, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

This is getting me really confused. Harold Wilson famously said "Don't worry, the pound in your pocket will still be worth one pound" when he devalued sterling. I didn't know he devalued the language as well. Agreed that "a thousand billion" is good terminology but I still say that "a million billion" is not English. 217.41.38.76 (talk) 09:03, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Harold Wilson also made the declaration that, as from 20 December 1974, the British government would use the word billion to mean a thousand million instead of the million million that it had previously meant. Some of us never forgave him! Dbfirs 17:09, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

My high school math textbook told me that biljardi means the game of billiards, not $10^{15}$. However, the construct is fairly logical, and I'm fairly sure there are people who use the word for the number, as well as triljardi for $10^{21}$ and so on. JIP | Talk 09:53, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

The French language makes a distinction between billiard (= a thousand billion, pron. [biljar]) and billard (= the game of billiards, pron. [bijar]). Contact Basemetal here 19:58, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

And similarly, Dutch uses biljard for the number and biljart for the game (though they are pronounced identically). - Lindert (talk) 21:23, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

"million billion" is perfectly idiomatic English, and occurs in lots of professional publications (Gizmodo: "The note is a B-flat, about 57 octaves below middle C, which is about a million billion times deeper than the lowest frequency sound we can hear", Oxford University Press: "The amount of biomass on Earth today is estimated to be of the order of a million billion kilogrammes of carbon.", The Economist: "Japan's K Computer, built by Fujitsu, currently rules the roost with 10.51 petaflops (computing power is measured in so-called floating-point operations per second, or flops; a petaflops is a million billion flops).", New Scientist: "Each had an energy of about 1 million billion electronvolts, otherwise known as a petaelectronvolt (PeV).") Smurrayinchester 09:39, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it makes sense in American English (and in Harold Wilson's short scale economics), but I had to check the peta prefix to check what was meant, and some readers who know only long scale would find it very confusing. Dbfirs 17:18, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

When 'out of' means 'at'

Check this link and scroll down to Robert Gillies, Victorian Young Australian of the Year.

He says:

• I still live out of home, so I want to thank my mum, first and foremost, I couldn't do anything if I didn't have her, providing the meals for me each night, being there for me for moral support.

Without the word 'still', I'd have read it that he no longer lives at his family home. Until I read the rest of it, and came to realise that he's using 'out of home' to mean 'at home'.

Is he saying that his mother's home is his abode but he's not there very much, cf. 'living out of a suitcase'? Or, if it's just a new way of saying 'at home', when did this usage arise? Is it used in any other contexts? Could one say 'I bought this widget out of K-Mart' or 'I spent the afternoon studying out of the library', and expect to be understood? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:11, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

In my opinion, by "out of" he means exactly what these words always mean.

I still live out of home, [so I can still feel the big difference between - what I undergo in this difficult period - and what I experienced during so many wonderful years when I was living at home with my mother], so I want to thank my mum, first and foremost, I couldn't do anything if I didn't have her, providing the meals for me each night, being there for me for moral support.

HOOTmag (talk) 09:43, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I think he means he lives at home, and is using a construction that we (in the USA at least) use more commonly with "work" or "based". Do these sentences confuse you? "This is Jones, who works out of Adelaide." "This is Jones, he's out of Adelaide." Likewise "Zhang works out of LA", "Zhang is based out of LA", "Zhang is based in LA" [1]. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:04, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, very much confused, Semantic Mantis. "He works out of Adelaide" says to me that he works in South Australia, not too far from Adelaide, probably within reasonable driving distance, but definitely NOT in Adelaide proper. "Based out of" seems to be confusing 2 concepts, or maybe trying to cover 2 bases in 1. A bank might have its head office in Adelaide and various branch offices in other places; we understand the connections between them all, and that head office decisions must proceed from the centre and be directed out to the branches. Or. from, the branches' perspective, their instructions come "out of Adelaide". But that is a different thing from saying where the head office is based. It's in Adelaide, not out of Adelaide. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:51, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

A home is a structure, which has volume, so there exists a literal inside and outside. "Out of" in this context works fine. "At" also works well, if you consider home a "location" which it also is. Either and both are perfectly cromulent, it just depends on what sense the speaker is considering the word "home"; as a location it is a point and takes "at", as a structure, it has dimensions and a volume, and "in" or "out of" also makes sense. --Jayron32 14:39, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Your description reminds me that this is basically about the various prepositions that we use to mark the Locative_case. Or rather, perhaps the confusion is that "out of" more usually marks an ablative case, but as you indicate, there is some significant semantic overlap. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:56, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

In that case, Jayron, is the speaker saying he lives in his mother's garden or back yard or driveway, but not inside the house proper? I hardly think so. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:00, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Not outside of. Out of As in, he leaves sometimes. When someone goes out of a doorway, it implies transit from the inner space to the outer space. If someone is outside of the doorway, they are not in at all. Every word and phrase has a meaning. --Jayron32 01:33, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

My linguistic conservatism calls this a dreadful American innovation of the late twentieth century, using more words to achieve less clarity. Thus, discovering that the Transportation Alternatives article accused that organization of being "based out of" New York, I replaced those three words with "in". Simplicity makes clarity, especially when aided by conservatism.

And I'm seriously tempted to change it back. An organization is a concept. It cannot be inside something, even though it might have a mailing address. I cannot put the T.A. in a box, or on a shelf. It also may well have people working in many other places. So go on all you want about "dreadful American innovation", but don't pretend that your preferred locution is in any objective sense better ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

The base of an organisation is where its main or head office is physically located. That's the physical building or office we're talking about, not the abstract concept or the organisational structure or the balance sheet. TA's head office is in, and not out of, New York, in exactly the same sense that the White House is in, and not out of, Washington, and the Egyptian Pyramids are in, and not out of, Egypt. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:00, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I think there's a subtlety here, as it regards American usage anyway. "He works in LA" is the normal usage for someone who is employed by a company with an office in LA, where he spends most of his working time. "He works out of LA" suggests something different — he probably has his own business, which provides goods and services to customers both inside and outside the City of Angels. He may very well travel frequently to provide those goods and services in person, but not necessarily. "He lives out of LA" makes no sense at all to me. --Trovatore (talk) 22:34, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Right. My American ear says there's a definite semantic difference between "based out of", "based in", "in" and "from". "In New York" means the organization is located in New York, implying (by omission) that it likely does not have operations elsewhere. "Based in New York" means that the headquarters and main operations are in New York, but implies it does operate elsewhere. "Based out of New York" implies an even further separation from New York - for example most operations happen outside of the city, or even that the nominal headquarters is in New York but major operations happen elsewhere. "From New York" emphasizes its origin, but not its current state; for example, an organization might be "from New York" but have its headquarters elsewhere. - In the case of the Transportation Alternatives article, "in" makes sense, but it's my general experience that subtlety and precision often get sacrificed at the alter of brevity. Feel free to argue that language should be "simple", in but please look to definition 6 before doing so. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 00:04, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I can't speak to Australian usage. In the US, I would take "out of" as more comparable to "from" (perhaps as a shortened form of "based out of") than "at". I would have found the original quote to have been an awkward and unusual usage. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:09, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I can't say I've heard that particular construction often (SW Ontario), but it sounds okay to me. The closest to that construction I usually hear is a parent' complaint that their child is going to "Eat them out of house and home", playing to the trope that raising a kid can bankrupt you right to "the poor house". 64.235.97.146 (talk) 15:18, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

• The idea that this is some sort of Americanism is quite weird, since the phrase is neither commonly heard in the US nor uttered by an American in this case. But the implication seems quite clear. He's living with his mother, but not being supported by his mother. That sort of arrangement makes a lot of sense in many cases, especially when you are single and self-supporting and the arrangement makes economic sense for the both of you. Yes, "based out of New York" is dreadful, but it's neither typically or solely American, it's just sloppy speech. I think Trovatore has pretty much nailed it. μηδείς (talk) 17:17, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
• I comprehend "to live out of home" as "to get the means for living from home". E.g. "His wife does never cook for him, so he lives out of restaurants", hence "[She has no place where to eat and sleep so] she lives out of her mother's home".--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:43, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

• Distilling and agreeing with Trovatore: To me, Alice works out of [place] strongly implies that her job – e.g. deliveries or repairs – keeps her roving away from her "base" office in [place] much of the time. —Tamfang (talk) 22:31, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Home office

When speaking English, Slovaks frequently use the term "home office" to refer to temporarily working from home (e.g. "I have home office next Monday"). I've been told (by Slovaks) that the term is used in this way by several international companies, but have found very little trace of this online (barring possibly this advert from Oracle). (Searching is not helped by the UK's Home Office, or by the use of the term to refer to a room at home.) Is this use completely normal; HR-speak; a neologism being pushed by particular companies; a local oddity; or something completely different? Henry^Flower 19:42, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

See http://www.onelook.com/?w=home+office for definitions.—Wavelength (talk) 20:06, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Could this be a Slovak construction simply translated into English? How do they say this in their native tongue? 217.41.38.76 (talk) 08:10, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Good question -- I'm not sure. The English words are certainly used in Sloglish: [2] has some examples in Slovak, Czech and Polish, though how many of those are referring to a room at home, I don't know. Henry^Flower 13:43, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Further googling for "habe home office" indicates that Germans also use it to refer to the practice; the examples I found seemed to be talking about a permanent rather than temporary arrangement, which may or may not be significant -- perhaps that's just the context in which people are likely to talk about it online. Henry^Flower 15:48, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

It's not something that would ever be said by an English native speaker. We would simply say "I'm working from home next Monday". --Viennese Waltz 09:07, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Although we do use the term as a location: "I'm in my home office now".--Phil Holmes (talk) 09:55, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Well yes, I did mention that in my original question, in a futile attempt to avoid getting sidetracked. Henry^Flower 15:48, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

"Working from home" is more common, but it's not the case that English native speakers never use "home office" as a synonym for "working from home". However, "home office" by itself can be ambiguous, as it is also a synonym for "headquarters" of a corporation. Hence, "my home office" vs. "the home office". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:50, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Also common in the U.S. is the rather obnoxious neologism telecommuting. --Jayron32 15:53, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm a freelancer, and I can say that 'telecommuting' is a world-wide phrase to describe my work. It's not just the US. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 17:08, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Does it grate on the ears in other countries as well? --Jayron32 17:15, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Not at all. It means you can work while still in bed. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 18:26, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Then it should be "teleworking", as no commuting occurs. "Telecommuting" sounds like the transporters in Star Trek. StuRat (talk) 20:03, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

"Telecommuting" seem to be somewhat of an oxymoron. And if only the bosses had Star Trek technology... "Computer, locate Joe Schmo." "He's at his home office, watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy and checking his email between battle scenes." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:51, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

As mentioned in the original question, the term Home Office only means a government department in the UK. Sorry KägeTorä, I've never heard of "telecommuting" and wouldn't know what it meant. "Working from home" is widely used and understood in London. Alansplodge (talk) 21:48, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

The term "telecommute" goes back to at least the mid-1970s,[3] and it's also pretty clear that the word "commute" has strayed quite a bit from its original meaning. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:53, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Half a century ago a "home office" was an organization's central headquarters, contrasted to the many "field offices". FBI still use The latter this way, As in FBI Cleveland field office. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:19, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

• "Home office" normally means (regional) headquarters. The Sloglish usage reminds me of the endearing abuse of English by the Japanese. (Not that I mind, or mean to pick on the Japanese. The Spanish do the same, using super- as a prefix where no Anglophone would.)

Bugs hits on an important point that needs expanding. If you really want to say "home office" to mean working from home you have to say HOME office. The normal term stressed home OFFICE means headquarters. μηδείς (talk) 18:40, 31 October 2015 (UTC)