Saga Cullen's Cryptic February

[trishwain]

A thousand amps in the ground rail (6) - A - A - E. Help, please, with parsing!

[aelmpvw]

takahe

[Mamyalynne]

12 Takahe (Rail, bird)

A K a(mps) in the

[trishwain]

Thank you both for such a speedy response, and especially Mamyalynne for the parsing. Now I see it, I think I've encountered it in a crossword before, but I would never have remembered it in a million years.
P.S. why is a thousand so complicated nowadays? It used to be M (Roman numeral), and then G (for grand) crept in, and now we have K (for kilo) as well - ho hum!

[Mamyalynne]

Just to keep us guessing ;-)

[klazomaniac]

I'm sure mamya is correct with ' to confuse us'. But there is a valid reason here.

The Amp was named after the French scientist 'Andre Ampere' And as the metric system was in place in France in the late 1800's, The symbol for 1000 amps is kA.
Lowercase k for 1000 and a uppercase A for amps. There is no gap between. So here the clue is using kA rather than K A.

Not trying to be pedantic. Just explaining why.

I like how the setters work hard to confuse us with new ways. I try and write clues from time to time. It's very hard to be unique with the plethora of words we have at hand.

[Jackdaw33]

Kilos(k) is Greek for a thousand.

[klazomaniac]

Yes Jackdaw. The kilo had been accepted by the metric system.

Milli would have been used otherwise. But kilo was already attributed.

So milli became a thousandth.

[klazomaniac]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo-

[fiction-factory]

It's quite common now for people to use K for 1000 when talking about money: "he has a salary of 80K..."

[fiction-factory]

… that's in addition to the longstanding k for kilo in Kg and Km