Comment by samatman
3 years ago
Can you show me a representative sample of places where English speakers refer to [unit of energy] burned by exercise and mean anything else other than kilocalories while saying anything else other than calories?
No, you can't, you're showing hypercorrection and lack of fluency.
Actually, I noticed it because the OP wrote kcal in one place and calories in another and since they were using large units I had to read the sentence twice to make sure they meant the same thing. I don't have a problem with the fact that we have a unit that means something in one context and 1000xsomething in another as long we're consistent in naming (only calories or only kcal in the context of diet). And of course I didn't mean to be mean (no pun intended) to the OP - being consistent is good but this is such a minor thing that we could safely ignore and it won't affect our lives at all - now I even feel sorry I paid attention to that.