"Milliseconds"

[beige_alert]

I try not to waste too much of my life watching sports on TV, but I watch the occasional race in one sport or another. Frequently the difference between gold, silver, bronze, and being forgotten about is just tens of milliseconds. A few milliseconds separate the "champion" from the "first looser," or are the difference between starting on the pole position and being over on the dirty side of the track.

For some reason I just can't understand, the people paid to spend an hour or more constantly throwing out numbers for us on TV, continuous updates on just how many hundredths of a second one competitor is ahead of or behind another, shouting with excitement at each new fast time set, will never, ever, say the word "millisecond." One would imagine it would be a very useful word in the vocabularies of the people who spend hours talking about tiny time differences. It's a perfectly ordinary word, but no matter how many times they trip over their own tongues shouting about the two-hundredths-of-a-second gap or the eleven-thousandths-of-a-second faster time, no matter how many ways they try rewording what they say to avoid sounding too repetitive, no matter that they've just gone into a long discussion about grip wax or blade sharpening or camber or the FIA legality plank or the f-duct, the word "millisecond" is forbidden to TV commentators. I'm mystified.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I'd guess they think milliseconds sounds too complicated and unfamiliar, and they're trying to sound accessible.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I suppose, and I know I'm not exactly a representative example of a normal person, but the Formula 1 guys in particular are not afraid to get fairly nerdy fairly often, and it just doesn't seem like such an exotic bit of vocabulary that they couldn't use it from time to time.

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

I guess they don't want to be associated with the metric system.

;)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

The announcers are quick with the calculators to Americanize the units, but the sports I watch you can't escape the metric system. The F1 races are all world-feed video, any speed put on the screen is km/hr. Bicycle race in France? 1500 *meter* speed skating race? Might as well give in!

[madfilkentist]

For that matter, why not "centiseconds"? I never hear anyone use that word, but it's a valid one, its meaning is obvious, and it's much easier to say than "tens of milliseconds."