On Fri, Dec 30, 2016, Ted Harding wrote: > And thank God we still use it [inches] in the KU (= "UK" backwards). > We have 36 of them to the yard (our historic predecessor > to the metre), which can therefore be divided by > 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36 > to give lengths consisting of whole numbers of inches. > As opposed to the metre, which only has the coarser > divisions of > 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50,100
Canada's a bilingual country, not only in our official languages, but in our measurements. Officially, we're metric, but the vast majority of Canadians continue use imperial when it suits the purpose at hand. We'll tell you the distance between two cities in kilometres, but the distance to the nearest rural gas station in miles. We have no trouble buying our milk in litres, but we brag about our Christmas turkeys in pounds. Truckers love metric tonnes because they're just about the same as imperial tons. Most of us don't really know big a hectare is, but forty acres still means something. Weirdly, we took to Celcius like ducks to water when it replaced Fahrenheit. And, of course, nobody turns their nose up at half-litres of beer, even if "pint" has a nicer ring. Base 12 is so obviously superior to metric for everyday use that one wonders how policymakers outside the United States were ever hoodwinked into metric fascism. My biggest beef with metric as an everyday system of measurement is that it has no equivalent to the inch *or* the foot. "Approximately one- to two-thirds of a meter long" is seriously not how anyone I know would describe something that was one to two feet long. Not having a convenient equivalent to inch and foot is a serious drawback of metric. Metrific fascism is a serious blow to English. "Miles from home" evokes isolation and loneliness. Besides being metrially (poetically, that is) awkward, "Kilometres from home" evokes nothing except maybe the urge to ask: "How many?" Imagine Frost's poem ending: "But I have promises to keep/And kilometres to go before I sleep." Or getting stuck in a traffic jam where the cars are two-point-five-centimetering along. Or describing a heat wave as "It must have been thirty-seven-point-eight degrees in the shade." At least Tennessee Ernie Ford can still load Sixteen Ton(ne)s. As to the subject of this thread, I strenuously object to removing that delightful and utterly unexpected bit of humour from the docs. God knows, they're dry enough as it is. :) -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca
