I always thought it should just have been "binary/decimal kilobyte" etc which would have neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of saying those words out loud and w

I always thought it should just have been "binary/decimal kilobyte" etc which would have neatly sidestepped the awkwardness of saying those words out loud and would have also likely satisfied most people who preferred using the traditional-within-computing binary meanings. In theory that would be universally applicable to any units and any base. Instead we have this ugly linguistic hack.