Word To Use Today: petaflops.

The word petaflops is, rather sadly, nothing to do with the French word péter, as made famous by le petomane, the feted French flatulist.

No, petaflops is a computer term to describe the speed of a computer. It is equivalent to a thousand million million floating-point operations per second.

I should imagine that's quite a lot.

How to use this lovely word in everyday conversation is something of a puzzle, but how about:

I fear his/her brain's processing powers are more flops than petaflops.

Yep. That should do it.

Word To Use Today: petaflops. The peta bit of this word comes from the SI unit denoting 10 to the power of 15. (It's the next unit up after tera, ten to the power of twelve.) The flops bit is short for floating-point operations per second.

I don't know which particular o, p, and s they've chosen to use from the phrase, though.