The problem can be much worse when two or more groups, e.g., anglophone and francophone Canadians, share the use of a facility. Usually, the issues are formally linguistic ones, but they may really be cultural or ethnic.
When my wife and I shop in Hoboken, NJ, which has a large Barese/Molfetani population, we do it in Italian, which entails buying cheese, cold meats and the like in multiples of the etto, one-tenth of a kilo[gram]. Asking for 'due etti' of prosciutto or sorpressata is, as a practical matter, only very marginally different from asking for a half pound; but the Italian formulation is wiser in that environment. Or again, when I buy Wurste in German at Schaller und Weber in Manhattan, I perforce buy them paarweise. This limits me to buying 2, 4, 6, . . . ; and, while I am sure that it would be possible to buy, say, 1, 3, or 5, it is not the convention to do so. We live in a world that is still full of such conflicting conventions; and I, for one, relish this diversity. Still, there are contexts in which disambiguation is necessary; and that is what standards are for. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
