[ScottAaronson]

No, they're called qubits. It's literally a quantum-mechanical bit, in the sense that it's a superposition of the |0> and |1> states---i.e., a quantum state that returns a bit when you make a complete measurement on it.

There are also qutrits, which are quantum trits (superpositions of |0>, |1>, and |2>), "qubytes" (collections of 8 qubits), and so on.

This terminology is now 30 years old, and in probably thousands of books and tens of thousands of papers. It's not going to change.

The earlier name for "qubit"---the name that Feynman, for example, would have recognized---was "spin-1/2 particle." But while there was some resistance, I think that even within particle physics, condensed-matter physics, etc., they'd now typically say qubit rather than spin-1/2.

In any case, would you pronounce "qit" like "kit" or "kwit"? :-)