Millions of Stupid Abbreviations

How do you abbreviate "millions" when you are writing about millions of dollars but have limited space on your pages?  Most bankers tend to use "mm" or "MM" as their abbreviations of choice.  But how is this possible?  There is only one "m" in the word!  And somehow, for consistency, the "mm" methodology is shared in abbreviating "billions" as "bb" or "BB," which becomes really confusing if you ever have to talk about billions of dollars on the same page as big balls or busty brunettes.

As a starting point, think about metric nomenclature, in which "K" stands for "kilo" (1,000) and M stands for "mega" (1,000,000).  After all, that's why you pay for champagne rooms by dropping several "k" rather than several "thousand."  And if you're talking about electronic data storage, 1,000 bytes (8,000 bits, but that is a whole other conversation) could also be called 1 kilobyte, or 1 KB.  Therefore, $1,000,000 would really be called 1 megadollar, or 1 MD.  But that's too ambiguous, since so many people in finance call themselves MDs!  What about 1 M$?  That is my suggestion if you want to be consistent with the metric system (which rich scientists also abbreviate as M$...confusing).  But practically speaking, people will whine about not having a currency sign as the leftmost character in an expression of numerical, monetary amounts, unless they are European.

I prefer the Euro sign on the right of the number because my beret constricts the blood flow to my brain.

Since I reside in America, the currency sign MUST be the leftmost character in the expression.  Thus, the best compromise with the metric system for abbreviating $1,000,000 appears to be $1M, as in $1 mega.  Then, theoretically, $1,000,000,000 should be 1 gigadollar, or $1 giga shortened to $1G.  But I've never seen that in any presentations before.  Why?  Because people are stupid, and will just ask you whether $1G means $1,000.  Now how do you feel about people that deal with billion dollar transactions not knowing the difference between $1,000 and $1,000,000,000?

So how did we ever get to mm, MM, bb, BB, etc.?  I've heard lots of theories about these, so let me highlight them (and how stupid they are) for you.

1. 1MM should represent 1 million because M is the Roman numeral for 1,000: A lot of people actually only know the first 9 digits of the Roman numeral system and assume this is true.  Really?  How do you write "20" in this system?  XX!  And "XX" doesn't mean "100," so why the hell would "MM" mean "1,000,000?"  Hopefully you told that big oil and gas company that their acquisition synergies would be $50MM next year, since you seriously meant $100,000, or 2 secretaries.  Note that drawing a line above (overlining?) the two Ms means multiplying, so that would theoretically work.
2. 1mm should represent 1 million since mm is the abbreviation for megamillions:  What?  First of all, I have heard many people say this, and it makes no sense.  Maybe they mean multimillions, but megamillions means either trillions or the lottery.  And "mm" means millimeters.
3. 1bb or 1BB should be used to represent 1 billion for consistency with abbreviations meaning 1 million: False.  Ah, the compulsive/psychotic fixation of bankers to make all formatting consistent, even if doing so makes no logical sense.  Neither bb or BB make ANY sense.  It's not even like we say begabillions or bultibillions.  Maybe they mean bunch(es) of billions like a fucking cereal.

Realistically, the best we can probably do is $1M and $1B for $1,000,000 and $1,000,000,000, respectively.  And guess what?  $1,000,000,000,000 would be $1T, which coincidentally matches the metric prefix of "tera."  But to be clear, my personal preference would be scientific notation; I suggest custom number formatting of $0.0_)E+00; ($0.0)E+00; "- " or you could always use the old-school method of x 10^a.  Keep in mind that if you are using Word, you can superscript selected text using CTRL + SHIFT + = and subscript using CTRL + =.

Lastly, what do you call someone obsessed with numbers in the quadrillions?  A petaphile!!!

-F-One