Phil Taylor writes: | John Chambers wrote: | >An interesting example: Sears is still one of the biggest seller of | >tools in the US, and they still sells tools labelled "Standard" and | >"Metric". You folks in the rest of the world may find yourself | >bewildered by this, but yes, they actually get away with it. | | Well, they can't exactly call the system of measurement based on the | inch, pound and gallon "Imperial" can they? Or maybe they can...
Well, they could, and you do still see this in the US. But "English" is the more common term used by people who understand that such measures are no longer the standard anywhere. The legal situation in the US is more complex than you might imagine. There was a rather funny NRP article in the late 80's about the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric". They explained what they meant by this, of course, and in the process explained a lot about the peculiar understanding of the term "standard" in this country. It seems that, since the late 1880s, the legal US definition of the inch is 2.54 cm. That's exact, because it actually is the definition of "inch". Similarly, "pound" is defined as so many grams, and so on with other measurements. I have this vision of a "standard American" music notation. It would look much like the European notation. But a quarter note would be 0.27 times the length of a whole note, and an eighth note would be 1/3 the length of a quarter note. Rests would be 1.5 times the length of the corresponding notes. And we'd call these "standard" note lengths. We'd think the "metric" note lengths are very difficult to learn, because they are all such strange multiples of the "standard" lengths. And we'd expend a huge effort in our printing industry to constantly convert between the two systems. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
