On 8/2/08 19:03, in article , "brian
mitchell" wrote:

Sacha wrote:

On 6/2/08 17:54, in article ,
"Martin" wrote:
Thank Gawd for the metric system.

But it's so bland, so boring. Thank God for Ye Olde English, if only
because it IS ours!

Exactly. These things are deeply embedded in language. You can't, for
example, talk about Our Hero two-point-five centimetering his way along
the crumbling ledge. It just doesn't have the same ring.

Then, what would we call a piece of artillery so massive it takes two
men to load the shell? Eighty-pounder! Not only the glorious pun on
'pound' but the subtle echo of weighty mass in 'eighty'. Weighty
pounder. Pure Poetry. By contrast, bringing up the thirty-six
kilogrammer sounds more millinery than military.

And it's not just the lexicon, there's the actual physical expression.
Yard! What a wide-open, full man's stride of a word, roared from the
chest. 'Metre' is such a meek and tweety sort of concoction. No wonder
even the French themselves shorten and flatten the e. I think they've
been planning this since Waterloo.

That was the first good laugh of the day, Brian. Thank you!

--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove weeds from address)
'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.'

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 12:44:09 +0000, Billit
wrote:

Could all my fellow allotment holders give me some idea how much they
are paying for there allotments I have ten rod plot and my rent for
2007/2008
was £60. 72 pence and a further increase of 25 pence per metre for the
year
2008 /2009.

£60? Ours has been £6 for the last 18 years or more. It has just gone
up to £8. Standard size allotment but I've not measured it!

Fascinated by all the maths involved!
Mixed measures? The one often quoted was ordering 2 metres of 4x4.
Perhaps they've got timber in metric now.

Pam in Bristol

In article ,
says...
Charlie Pridham writes
In article ,
says...

Thank Gawd for the metric system.

Metric has the brilliant property that lengths and volume measures 'fit'
with each other - eg 1ml of water is 1cc so 1 litre is 10cm x 10x m
x10cm, which is also 1kg, so 1 tonne = 1m cubed.

But it doesn't have useful sized measures - the inch is still good for
smallish things, and the foot is ideal for all sorts of things - much
easier to understand the difference between a 10ft square room and a
12ft square room than a 3.something m square room and a 3.something else
m square room.

It's only easier for you because it's what you're used to, though.
--
Linz
Wet Yorks

Amethyst Deceiver says...
In article ,
says...
Charlie Pridham writes
In article ,
says...

Thank Gawd for the metric system.

Metric has the brilliant property that lengths and volume measures 'fit'
with each other - eg 1ml of water is 1cc so 1 litre is 10cm x 10x m
x10cm, which is also 1kg, so 1 tonne = 1m cubed.

But it doesn't have useful sized measures - the inch is still good for
smallish things, and the foot is ideal for all sorts of things - much
easier to understand the difference between a 10ft square room and a
12ft square room than a 3.something m square room and a 3.something else
m square room.

It's only easier for you because it's what you're used to, though.

When the metric system was introduced into the UK I thought
at the time how useful the decimetre would be. However, it
seldom gets a mention - many people probably wouldn't know
that it was 10cm. Everything metric seems to be in units of
mm, cm, m or km but never dm.
--
David in Normandy.
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