[Pookie]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

You noticed that too? There's a benign way of saying "billion" and Sagan really doesn't know what it is.

"In 1980...people were ready for billions. Mere millions had become a little downscale, unfashionable, miserly. Actually, the two words sound sufficiently alike that you have to make a serious effort to distinguish them. This is why, in Cosmos, I pronounced "billions" with a fairly plosive "b", which some people took for an idiosyncratic accent or speech deficiency."