Yes, but your 'une livre de carottes' (unless you wanted a book on the
subject!) would not have weighed 456 g or whatever but 500 g. The old
units have been rounded into the metric system, where they are still
used. There is one exception: une livre de pain is now 450 g (because
the moulds the bakers used were too small to take 500 g, so they rounded
it down to the nearest 50 g).
For the anecdote, I was at a farmers' market, here in Cyprus, a few
years ago and there was an ancient lady flogging some magnificent
potatoes, I would guess well into the 90s. I jokingly asked her, in my
best Greek, for an oke (about 1.3 kg, a unit that was inherited here
from the Ottomans but remained ± current until the 1950s). She put some
in a bag and weighed them (just under 1.4 kg) without turning a single
white hair or batting a wrinkled eyelid. She then said to me, with a
toothless grin, that will be 88 piastres (currency that went out in
1954, 180 piastres to the Cyprus pound). I did a quick bit of mental
arithmetic and paid her €0.83. I must have made her day, as her grin
turned into a big smile and she added another three large spuds into the
bag, with efharistos all round!
Seriously though, there is one thing that really does get my goat and
you, Mike, and many others here, commit the heinous crime of omitting
the space between the value and the unit as is explained very clearly in
the same ISO spec (31-0) as the SI system of units (50mm x 25mm, instead
of the correct 50 mm x 25 mm). There is a VERY good reason for this
space and that is because many typefaces differentiate little between 1
and l or 0 and O. Does 5.71m mean 5.7 lumens or 5.71 metres? 5.71 m is
totally unambiguous.
Brian
Mike Fenner wrote:
> Well one or the other is OK and preferable to where we are in UK.
> We have been converting for years and are presently stuck in the middle. So
> we use miles, feet /mm, pounds grams, and celsius/centigrade/fahrenhet,
> pints and litres as we see fit. Example; I bought 5 x 6 feet lengths of50mm
> x 25mm wood this weekend. Luckily all science and technology is strictly
> metric.
>
> What you find is that young people who were taught only metric still think
> in vague Imperial as you say, but they don't know the crazy parts like how
> many ounces in a pound, or how many pounds in a ton.
> How long before we completely change? Last time I went to a French veggie
> market they understood un livre de..... sil vous plait. [a pound of
> ......please] quite well. And they have been at it since about 1780
> something. Or maybe they made special condescension for Ancient Brit.
>
>
> Regards
>
>
> Mike
>
> Ps: pleasestay Imperial till I get my old car finished. All my nuts ,bolts
> spanners etc come originally from US suppliers
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of bob wettermann
> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 3:36 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [TN] European Union Council Directive 80/181/EEC (Metric
> Directive)
>
> Has anyone asked someone currently in grade school how much they weigh?How
> tall thy are? How far away something is? The answers are always in english
> units. Any time the school system works on teaching our kids how to convert
> units there a giant waste of precious teaching time!!!! Until this changes
> american companies will have a workforce that is behind the rest of the
> world that speaks metric! This is a barrier for the technical trades, social
> issues (try to order a pint of beer in Italy) and for international trade
> (it is an artificl trade barrier for goods coming into the US).
>
> Bob Wettermann
> PH 847-767-5745
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: "Stadem, Richard D." <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 7:01:03 AM
> Subject: Re: [TN] European Union Council Directive 80/181/EEC (Metric
> Directive)
>
> I'll plead the fifth.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Burke
> Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 5:22 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [TN] European Union Council Directive 80/181/EEC (Metric
> Directive)
>
>
>
>
> Er..........the engineers have taken to drinking liters instead of pints
> to
> fall in line with it ............a very wavy line at that......
>
>
>
> John Burke
>
> (408) 515 4992
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Phil Nutting
>
> Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 12:20 PM
>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Subject: [TN] European Union Council Directive 80/181/EEC (Metric
> Directive)
>
>
>
> Have any of your companies started to convert to meet this EU Directive?
>
>
>
> Phil Nutting
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> John Burke
>
> (408) 515 4992
>
>
>
>
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