(Re: USMA 11514 by me and 11515 by Louis)
John, Louis and all,
I got this stuff from their Yardstick about the trash-ditional units
supposed to be used in France:
http://members.aol.com/footrule/ystwob.htm
The Yardstick, Number 2 (April 1996) -- Part B
TRADITIONAL MEASURES ABROAD
France
Here is a partial list of non-metric measures still used in France, sent to
us by Alan Harrison, to whom many thanks.
Knot (noeud) for speed of boats, planes and wind
Nautical mile (mille marin)
Nautical league (lieue marine), i.e. 3 nautical miles
Hand (paume) for the height of a horse
** Is it 7.5 or 10 cm, by chance?
Carat (carat)
**This is the metric carat.
***The standard railway gauge is still referred to in feet and inches by
railway engineers, although non-specialists have converted it to
centimetres.***
** The French use centimeters more than they use millimeters, but I have
usually seen this gauge expressed as 1435 mm. Engineers use the
millimeter anyway.
Degree of angle. Grades exist (1 right angle = 100 grades) but they are used
much less frequently than degrees.
**Too stupid for words)
Time. There was an attempt to convert both the calendar and the clock to a
decimal system but it was never popularly accepted and soon fell into
disuse.
**Too stupid and farfetched for words.
League (lieue). The newspaper "La Charente Libre" on Friday 22.2.96
described a village as being less than two leagues from the nearest town:
"Le village d'Antezant-la-Chapelle est ... moins de deux lieues de St. Jean
d'Angély."
**I suspect that in this case our BWMA friends have cited out of context;
very carefully they omit to cite the entire text. How stupid they are; if I
send an e-mail to them, stating that a small island here is called
Tiengemeten -loosely translated as Ten Acres, a gemet was an acre type
unit- these fools will put on their site that we use old units of area. Just
as
stupid as what those British youths(!!!) on the coach thought, when
seeing a sign 'Breda 40' they assumed that we were 40 miles distant
from that city.
** Suppose I am from the BWMA and I am in the beautiful city of Deventer.
They sell spicy cakes there, called 'Deventer koek'. One version of it is
'ellekoek', 'ells cake', it has the length of the old cloth ell of 68 cm.
Another coup! The Dutch don't want meters! They use ells! I have that on our
site straight away!
I regard this as a harmless tradition and it would be foolish to oppose it.
We had an ell in the past, and we remember that in the length of that cake.
Handmade leather gloves. The leather is measured for cutting out, using a
foot ruler marked in inches, at a factory near Limoges (quoted on TV channel
3 on Saturday, 24 February).
** In this case they are right. The leather trade uses feet and inches. I
have
seen such nonsense on a market in Arnhem (north of Nijmegen) a few years
ago, leather was sold by the square English foot. I do not understand why.
Unlike the 'ellekoek' in Deventer, I would want this OUT!
The BWMA-idiots really think that metric requires its users to stick to a
rigid decimal scheme all the time and that they are supposed never to use
fractions when they are convenient. From the beginning, a limited use
of binary fractions was allowed and built in material weights and
measures, a decimal serie and one having 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2/1 meters,
kilograms and liters. The A paper sizes are part of their propaganda as they
divide progressively by halving. Even the musical notation is used by them.
And the eight, quarter and the half finals of the European- and World Cup!
Han
<snip>
